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| Kate Ryan |
She was face-down, her hat in the grass. A hatpin was still in her hand. When the police rolled her over, they found a bullet hole between her eyes.
Her name was Kate Ryan, though in Bucktown she went by Rose Earl. She worked at Babe Foreman’s house, one of the licensed brothels in Davenport’s red-light district.
Since 1893, the city had made vice official business. The police collected monthly fines from the madams, and the girls worked without fear of raids. It was cleaner that way, they said. Predictable. Kate’s boss paid twenty-five dollars for the house license and ten more for each girl. Kate Ryan was legal. Until she wasn’t.
The man everyone blamed was Peter Shardis, known to the streets as Pete Sardine. He was thirty-five, short, with a limp and a bottle habit. He’d come from Greece eight years earlier, drifted between Moline and Davenport, working in foundries until he drank his way out of them.
He’d been seeing Kate for three years, paying for her time, talking about marriage. She laughed it off. He didn’t.
The day before her death, he haunted Babe Foreman’s parlor, muttering in Greek, pacing the hall. He accused Kate of cheating, said he’d kill her if she wasn’t true.
“Shoot her like a dog,” one girl remembered him saying.
At six that evening, he handed Babe three dollars for Kate’s company. Babe warned her not to go. Kate went anyway.
They stopped at Pete the Belgian’s saloon. Kate took a dollar from another man and went upstairs. Sardine stayed at the bar, waiting. When she came down, she smiled at him. He said nothing.
Later they went to Simon Yann’s place, then the Pariser Garden. At eight, they rented a buggy from Brick Munro’s stable. Harry Rush, the stable boy, remembered her well—pretty, sharp-tongued, wearing black with a tilted hat.
“She said she was out for fun,” he told police. “Said she’d be back later with another fellow.”
Sardine glared at her. Rush never forgot the look.
Around three in the morning, Officer Behm saw a buggy heading toward Fairmount Cemetery. The night was foggy, the road empty. Couldn’t say for sure that it was them. No reason to stop it.
By morning, Kate was dead.
Her clothing was torn, her throat bruised. There was no blood at the scene—she’d been shot somewhere else and dragged to the ravine. The buggy Sardine rented lay wrecked against a tree fifty feet away.
The police gathered statements. Every one of them pointed to Pete Sardine. He’d been drinking, he’d threatened her, and now he was gone.
Detectives found his room in Moline empty except for a few letters. One, never mailed, asked Kate to marry him. Another, written by her, made it plain she didn’t love him.
The coroner’s jury ruled her death a murder “from a pistol shot fired by Peter Shardis.” The grand jury indicted him, not that it mattered. He was nowhere to be found.
In the days after the killing, witnesses placed Sardine in several Iowa towns—Buffalo, Ottumwa, Muscatine, Iowa City—but he always vanished before police arrived. Eventually the trail led to Chicago. After that, nothing. The rumor was he’d taken a ship back to Greece.
Business went on at Babe Foreman’s house. The girls went back to work. Bucktown’s music started up like nothing had happened.
Kate was buried in Fairmount Cemetery, near the trees. There was never a trial, never an arrest.
The file closed with the same facts it began with: A woman found in the ravine. A hatpin in her hand. A rented buggy against a tree. A man named Pete Sardine who said he’d kill her—and disappeared before anyone could prove he did.
That was Davenport in 1906. Everything added up. Nothing fit.
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