Woman Slugged; Left for Dead: The True Crime of Handsome Jack Koetters

On November 14, 1912, house detectives at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago discovered the body of a woman in room 409 on a blood-soaked mattress. The labels in her clothing led police to Cincinnati, where friends and relatives identified the belongings of Mrs. Emma Kraft, a highly-respected widow who had recently taken up with a much younger man of dubious reputation, one John B. Koetters, known about town as "Handsome Jack." A nationwide manhunt was on, but it took several months for the fugitive to turn up in San Francisco under the name Nieman, where he was involved with the widowed owner of a residential hotel. In "Woman Slugged; Left for Dead," True Crime Historian Richard O Jones spins the tale of a fallen woman, a man on the run and a frustrated captain of detectives who pulled out no stops to find Handsome Jack.