When 8-year-old Buddy Schumacher was murdered in 1925, investigators figured it was a case that would wrap itself up quickly. No one anticipated that it would remain a mystery, 95 years later.
Arthur “Buddy” Schumacher was born on September 2nd, 1916 to parents Arthur “Art” and Florence May Zapp Schumacher. He was the couple’s second child, his sister, Jeanette Alice, was just over a year older than him. The family settled down in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and lived a relatively simple, and happy life.
Wauwatosa was a small mill town that was close to the city of Milwaukee. As trains and automobiles became more and more popular as modes of transportation, Wauwatosa became an active little community, full of life and vigour. But it also had a bit of a dark side.
In the early 1920s, the Milwaukee area was known for its missing children – especially young boys. In 1923, two young boys had gone missing in the area, which prompted a lot of media attention. The attention these cases got would foreshadow what was to come.
As the media swooped in, all logic flew the coop. The ‘20s were the height of sensationalist, “yellow” journalism. The use of crime, news, scandal, divorces, and sex were fodder for the masses, and major bucks in the pockets of newspaper owners. Fake news was literally the bread and butter of print media.
As news of these disappearances made headlines, the entire Milwaukee and surrounding area grew fearful and cautions. They worried this could happen to their children. They began monitoring where children were going, what they were doing, and who they were with. Then, time went by, and no children had been reported as missing.
On the morning of July 24th, 1925, Buddy Schumacher ate his breakfast, then left his house around 9:00 AM. He told his parents he was taking the train with friends to go down to a swimming hole. His parents sent him on his way, and told him to have fun. But then, Buddy didn’t come home.
As evening wore on, Buddy’s father, Art, started going around to the homes the Buddy’s friends, asking if Buddy was there, as he had yet to return home. But Buddy’s friends hadn’t seen him for quite some time. They told Art that they had lost sight of Buddy somewhere between the swimming hole, and the train tracks.
Art then went round to see if Buddy had paid visit to any of his relatives, who also lived in Wauwatosa. But he wasn’t there, and none of them had seen the 8-year-old that day.
Florence hoped that Buddy would be back by morning. She prayed he’d return to her. But he didn’t. Art organized a town-wide search. Family and friends went to the swimming hole, thinking that maybe, just maybe, he’d ended up in the lake, or the nearby river. But Buddy wasn’t anywhere near the water.
After the search failed to turn up any sign of his son, Art decided it was time to call in the big guns – he phoned the police, and the local news agencies, and reported Arthur “Buddy” Schumacher as missing. The news flew around the small community of Wauwatosa like rapid fire.
Tongues wagged, and rumours quickly spread. Newspapers threw out any old tale they could, to keep headlines fresh, and dough rolling in. One popular rumour claimed that Buddy had been kidnapped by a vengeful family member who bore a grudge against Art. The town was all a twitter about it, targeting various members of both Art and Florence’s families. However, this rumour was never substantiated, and is highly likely to be completely false.
Art and Florence had wanted attention drawn to their missing son – another missing Wisconsin child – but they had never anticipated this.
George Baltis, the Police Chief of the Wauwatosa Police Department, tried to assuage the public perception that a kidnapper was in their midsts. He wanted an arrest, and he wanted it now! He didn’t particularly care if whomever they arrested was guilty or innocent.
However, he did attempt to conduct a proper investigation. First, he questioned Buddy’s friends, who were the last people to see him before he disappeared. But they proved difficult to speak to.
At first, they told Baltis and his detectives that an unkempt man had appeared at the swimming hole, and chased the four boys into the forest. As they were running from the man, the three older boys lost sight of Buddy.
In a different instance, the boys told detectives that they’d been chased off by a man from a stone quarry.
And yet a third story made it’s way to the police by way of the local newspaper. One of the boys made a statement to a reporter. The story went that the boys had prepared to jump off the train in order to get to the swimming hole. As they jumped, the boy told the reporter that they heard a man say: “Hey, where those kids goin’”, and he jumped off the train to follow them. As the boys ran away from the man, the noticed that Buddy didn’t run – he stayed near the tracks. The man lost interest in chasing the three runners, and approached Buddy by the tracks. The boy’s statement to the reporter claimed that this man was one of the many transients that had come to town.
The influx of transportation had attracted transients to Wauwatosa. They set up camps near the tracks, intent on travelling to and fro, looking for work, or just living on the rails. Their presence worried the locals, and soon, detectives set their sights on the community as the source of Buddy’s disappearance. Once this theory took hold, emboldened by sensational journalism, the townspeople soon were turning in anyone they wished, and called in with reports of suspicious, transient men.
On July 27th, 1925, a 10-year-old orphaned boy led police down to where Buddy was last seen. He told them that he and his friends, who had set up a small camp for themselves, had been repeatedly harassed by two middle-aged men. The camp was close to where Buddy’s friends said they’d jumped off the train, and the theory that these two men took Buddy seemed as likely a theory as any. But the men were no longer in the area, and couldn’t be found.
As time wore on, the search for Buddy grew more and more desperate. The Schumacher family wanted to bring their little boy home. A member of the Coast Guard scoured the river to look for Buddy, in case he’d drowned in the lake, or the river. Detectives also set off dynamite near the rock quarry the boys claimed to be playing at the day Buddy disappeared. Neither venture was fruitful.
Stressed, anxious, and unable to handle the devastation of losing Buddy, and the subsequent press attention, Art and Florence took their daughter, and left Wauwatosa to visit relatives further north. Just as they left, a man from Milwakee came to town in order to hunt for mushrooms.
After a few hours of foraging, the man was quite unsuccessful. Then, he spied a small thicket which had an odd look. He went over, and gave it a good look. There, he found the body of a young boy, barely four feet away from a well-trodden path.
The mushroom forager had a hunch that this boy was Buddy Schumacher, but he couldn’t be certain. And if he was wrong, well, he didn’t want to risk alerting anyone, and being dragged into the story by the papers.
So, with his son and a friend in tow, they found a picture of Buddy in the papers, and took it with them as they went back down the path, and found the thicket. After a quick comparison, all three men agreed that the boy was, in fact, little Buddy Schumacher. Now armed with certainty, the mushroom forager contacted the police.
Police Chief Baltis went to find Art and Florence, to ask them to come down and positively identify the body. But they weren’t there. Buddy’s uncles had to go and identify Buddy.
The official reports state that the badly decomposed and mutilated body of Buddy Schumacher was found on September 13th, 1925 – seven weeks after he’d gone missing.
Art and Florence were located, and told of the discovery. The family rushed back to Wauwatosa.
The autopsy showed that Buddy had been beaten, abused, sexually assaulted, and strangled. However, the official cause of death was found to be a handkerchief which had been stuffed down Buddy’s throat.
Newspapers latched onto the discovery, and ran headline after headline. They even swarmed Buddy’s funeral. All they succeeded in doing was sending the town into a frenzy, trying to find Buddy’s killer.
Detectives soon focused on the transient community, investigating and questioning every transient found in the area around the time of Buddy’s death.
Their hope lie almost entirely on the handkerchief. In the corner, the letter “A” was found embroidered into the fabric. Art had already told detectives that the handkerchief did not belong to him, or Buddy. Which meant that it could only belong to the killer. Hoping for public cooperation, a description and photo of the handkerchief was placed in the paper. Detectives hoped someone would come forward with a name.
However, detectives continued to investigate the transient community, in the hopes of finding Buddy’s killer. Within the community, detectives found Edward Vreeland. He’d gained police attention early on, but when Buddy’s friends couldn’t positively identify him as the man they’d seen on the train, the questioning stopped. He wasn’t let go, though. Instead, he was sent to a nearby correctional facility to serve a sentence for vagrancy.
After Buddy’s body was found, the boys were brought back to the police station, and asked to look at a lineup of men. Edward had been transported from the facility to stand in the lineup. Detectives hoped that seeing him would jog the memories of the boys. One of them couldn’t positively identify him, while the other two did. This was more than enough for detectives, and they believed wholeheartedly that they had their man.
They began gathering evidence to fit the narrative. Edward’s case was not helped when two 10-year-old boys came forward and stated that Edward had taken them for a walk, and then had “mistreated” them. Edward denied all of these accusations. With little factual evidence to hold him for Buddy’s murder, detectives returned him to the correctional facility to serve the rest of his sentence.
However, on September 22nd, Edward wanted an audience with the detectives in charge of Buddy’s murder investigation. He confessed to them that he often suffered from memory lapses. He stated that it was very possible that he had killed Buddy, and simply didn’t remember doing it.
Newspapers got wind of the tale, and took Edward’s convoluted word as a factual confession of guilt. But Edward had someone in his corner.
His brother Charles had read the papers, and read about what his brother had supposedly done. Charles quickly drove from Illinois to visit his brother in Wisconsin. Then, he hired a local attorney to represent Edward. Charles’s hope was that the attorney would stop Edward from doing something that he would later regret. He did just that, stopped Edward before it was too late.
With the handkerchief their only remaining lead, detectives put all their focus on that, returning to the description and photograph in the papers. As luck would have it, they received a call from a Mrs. Emma Able on September 24th, 1925, claiming that she recognized the handkerchief.
Mrs. Able told detectives that she’d taken a man into her home for a couple of days, and shared meals with him as he was starving. The man had been in possession of that handkerchief. She stated that the man’s name was Edward Vreeland. She also offered to come down to the police station to personally identify the handkerchief. However, on the day she arrived to make this identification, detectives found that the handkerchief was gone. They tore the department apart looking for it. But it was nowhere to be found.
However, with his name coming up once again, detectives decided to pay Edward another visit. This time around, they brought him to the thicket where Buddy had been discovered. Once there, Edward took a look around and stated: “Before God, I am innocent.”
At their wits’ end, detectives began contemplating using a new “truth serum” on Edward, in order to make him talk. Thankfully, the investigation wouldn’t come to that. A clerk in the DA’s office found the missing handkerchief. It had been accidentally placed in a safe, along with other important documents.
Fortified with the return of their main piece of evidence, detectives brought Mrs. Able back to the station in order to identify the handkerchief. This proved to be another setback, as she was unable to say with 100% certainty whether or not this was the handkerchief she’d seen Edward carry with him during his stay at her residence.
For Edward’s brother, Charles, and his attorney, this was the last straw. Edward’s attorney accused the police department of misconduct, and began the process of filing a writ for unlawful detention of his client. With a potential lawsuit hanging over the department, detectives had no choice but to let Edward go, and return him to the correctional facility in order to finish his sentence for vagrancy.
The department’s case against Edward continued to fall apart from there. Buddy’s friends returned to the station, and announced that Edward wasn’t actually the man they saw on the train. They’d named him because they’d felt pressured by the detectives to do so.
Leads dried up, and detectives made no progress on the Buddy Schumacher murder investigation. Until a couple of weeks later.
On October 14th, the body of 11-year-old Frances Pioletti was found mutilated in a vacant house in St. Paul, Minnesota. Frances suffered a blow to to the back of the head. But of note to detectives in both Minnesota and Wisconsin was the fact that Frances was found with a handkerchief stuffed down his throat.
St. Paul police were very, very quick to locate Frances’s killer. They arrested 21-year-old William Brandt, who confessed to the murder after two hours of questioning.
With the handkerchief linking the cases, St. Paul detectives invited the detectives from Wauwatosa to question Brandt. Brandt admitted to suffering from epileptic seizures, which sometimes caused memory lapses, and bouts of extreme violence. Brandt experienced one such seizure while being questioned. While he didn’t get violent, he did faint.
In due course, Brandt was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Frances Pioletti.
While in prison, Brandt confessed to a newspaper reporter that he was, indeed, the man who murdered Buddy Schumacher. He claimed that he didn’t remember the murder, exactly, but that he remembered seeing the boys on the train, and then hiding the body.
Brandt’s confession was taken as gospel, and was considered the official last word on the investigation. However, some seasoned reporters were quick to point out the discrepancies between Brandt’s confession, and the facts of Buddy’s murder.
Brandt had claimed that Buddy was a bloody mess when he’d been killed. But the boy had been clean of blood when he’d been found. Brandt also claimed that he’d stuffed Buddy’s overalls down a drainpipe, but Buddy was wearing them when he was found. He also claimed to have torn the handkerchief he used on Buddy in order to remove his initials from the fabric, but the embroidered “A” was clearly intact. Further negating Brandt’s confession, Buddy’s friends stated that they’d never seen William Brandt before he’d appeared in the papers as France Pioletti’s kiler.
Soon after that, William Brandt retracted his confession. Detectives were left without any suspects, except for the vast transient community, who were not willing to cooperate due to rough treatment by Wauwatosa townspeople and police, and they no longer had any leads to pursue.
The public never came forward with anything meaningful, and soon, the papers lost interest in the case. The Schumacher name would reappear every now and then, whenever another child went missing in the area.
Years later, the Schumacher family home changed hands, and fell to the Hoffman family. Paul Hoffman became enraptured with the case.
In his book about the case (which I have not read due to time and life constraints), Paul claims that he believes he knows the identity of the person who murdered little Buddy Schumacher. However, he refuses to divulge the information so as not to defame a family name “on the pretence of an educated guess”.
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Sources:
What Happened to Little Buddy Schumacher Jr.? – Emily H. – Inside Mystery
Murder in Wauwatosa: Hoffman recounts a tragic murder close to home – Bobby Tanzilo – On Milwaukee
‘Hermit endures scrutiny of slain boy’s friends’ 1925 – Paul Hoffman – Wauwatosa Now Archive
Unsolved Murders Podcasts – Episodes 204 and 205 – Arthur “Buddy” Schumacher – Part 1 (episode 204) and Part 2 (episode 205)