When Deputy Sheriff Frank Glover checked in on his prized chickens on the morning of June 6, 1914 on Napier and Pipestone Streets in Benton Harbor, he found that ten of his birds had flown the coop, so to speak. They didn’t literally fly away, but they did in fact disappear, with a little assistance from a hen thief. The Deputy immediately turned on his detective sense, and spotted a clue outside the coop: Fresh wheel tracks in the mud, accompanied with imprints from a particularly uneven horseshoe. These tracks led from the Glover ranch to the culprit, and Frank and Sheriff Fred Franz quickly tracked down the guilty party: John J. Freemyer, who lived off of Britain Avenue, about fifteen minutes away. The cops saw Freemyer’s horse outside, cobbled unevenly, and they confronted the man about the missing birds. At first he denied any knowledge of the hens, but later fessed up to the crime, pointing most of the blame on his accomplice, Bert Evens, who was with him at the time.
Bert and John both worked for the dog pound. John was the warden and Bert was the dog wagon driver. Bert said that he thought they went to Glover’s ranch to snatch a dog, not chickens. But he also told the cops that John had also stolen four birds from someone else before they traveled down to Glover’s place, insisting that he didn’t like him anyway. So it would seem that Bert’s plausible deniability defense had a few holes in it.
The stolen chickens also didn’t have a leg to stand on, once Freemyer was done with them. By the time Glover and Franz had tracked him down as the guilty party, he’d already butchered the birds, dressed them and put them on ice. Freemyer and Evans were immediately arrested for the crime.
Benton Harbor’s News-Palladium ran a very colorful version of this affair on June 8, 1914. “Last Friday evening, Deputy Frank Glover retired at his usual hour after having carefully locked the door of his hencoop. Inside his coop, ten of the fattest and plumpist hens to be found hereabouts nodded peacefully and dreamed of the morrow’s feast of worms and corn. The night passed. Morning came. Frank hurried out to his chickens with a pan of corn. When he threw open the door he cried aloud at the spectacle before him. The hencoop was empty — few scattered feathers told of the night’s foul work. Frank loved his chickens and he sobbed and swore vengeance.”
Meanwhile the St. Joseph Daily Press reported, in their own stylistic way that, “Before the officers reached the end of the lane that led to the house of the coop looter the chickens had been dressed and put on ice in immediate readiness for the roaster. There they were on ice – ten of them– once fancy blue blooded stock, hoi polloi of the hennery with feathers on worth a dollar and some a pound, but denuded and with cackle silenced, pot broilers at the market price of any old kind of chicken.”
The Press made sure to point out the fact that while Sheriff Franz ended up eating some of the evidence, it wasn’t due to scandal but rather because Glover made the best of a bad situation and gave Fred two chickens for his Sunday dinner.
That might’ve been the end of the story in any other county, but not so for Berrien County, because John Freemyer wasn’t just a chicken thief. He was also a felon on parole for shooting a man in 1909.
Yes, the dog warden for Berrien County in 1914 had a sketchy past. Despite having two successful doctors for parents, George and Harriet Freemyer, young John decided to play the part of an outlaw gunslinger in Benton Harbor when he was 26-years-old. John and a buddy decided to hold up those passing on the highway north of Benton Harbor in wild west fashion. A farmer, George Frazee was shot three times, and seriously injured when Freemyer tried to steal his horse. Freemyer was convicted of assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than the crime of murder and sent away to Jackson state prison until 1911, when he was paroled. After he stole Frank Glover’s chickens, it was speculated that he broke his parole.
When all was said and done, Freemyer pleaded guilty to simply larceny and was ordered to pay $50 in fines and court costs or serve 30 days in jail. He paid the fine. Bert Evans spent 107 days in jail and was put on probation for a year. Clearly, the chickens got the raw end of the entire deal.
John Freemyer ended up marrying six times, and moved to Alabama, where he shot another person (in the arm) after a fight in his house. He died in Ashland, Alabama in 1953.
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