#pi-beta-phi — Public Fediverse posts

Madge and the KKK: The Murder and the Monster That Shook America

Indiana in the 1920s was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity. The state governor, Ed Jackson was a Klan supporter, as were Indianapolis Mayor Ed Duvall and several other city officials. But even higher up—indeed, as high as you could go in the Klan hierarchy—was D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana, the most exalted position one could hold.

Stephenson wielded great power and in his position helped the Klan grow not only in Indiana but throughout the United States. It also made him extraordinarily rich (at age 33 he was worth $900,000 which equates to about $20 million in today’s money) and, for a while, untouchable no matter what he did.

Reporters and editors for newspapers like the Hammond Times as the Northwest Indiana Times was called back then faced death threats for criticizing the Klan.

But all that changed when Madge Oberholtzer, a pretty young woman who was a neighbor of Stephenson in their Irvington neighborhood in Indianapolis, died after making a deathbed statement.

I first met author Charlotte Halsema Ottinger at a book signing in Irvington at a now-closed bookstore near where she lives in Irvington and we talked about Maggie, as she calls Madge, having researched her short life in amazing detail which she recounts in her book, “Madge: The Life and Times of Madge Oberholtzer” (Irvington Historical Society).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5dI0RkpsTU

Stephenson’s home was just down the street from the bookstore where we met, Ottinger told me, and I walked past it on a beautiful fall day. Two stories with tall columns, it’s a beautiful place. But almost one hundred years ago, despicable things happened there.

On the night of Sunday, March 15, 1925, Madge received a call from Stephenson who sent a car to pick her up. Until then, she had met him socially along with other people. Responding to the call, she walked to his home and her ordeal began.

He physically assaulted her in front of several of his colleagues and forced her to accompany him on his private train car which was headed to Hammond, Indiana. In his compartment, he brutally raped her, leaving deep bite marks all over her body. It was these wounds and not the mercury chloride she took because she was ashamed of what had happened (after all, back then rapes were often blamed on the victim), but of sepsis caused by an infection from his teeth marks.

“It was less than five years before they created antibiotics and so they were only treating these wounds with a topical antiseptic to clean them,” says Ottinger, who became fascinated by Madge’s story for several reasons beyond how she is credited with bringing down the Klan.

“I live near where she lived,” says Ottinger, who also notes she and Maggie belonged to the same sorority, Pi Beta Phi, at what was then Butler College and is now Butler University in Indianapolis. “My daughter’s fiancé, who was doing family research, discovered that his grandfather worked for Maggie’s brother. And in another connection, they didn’t have sorority houses at Butler when Maggie was a member and so for about a year they used the house where my husband and I live as a place for their party to meet.”

As she was dying and in great pain, Stephenson’s henchmen dropped Oberholtzer at the home she shared with her parents, believing she would soon die but she managed to rally long enough to make her statement which ran in papers throughout the country. Stephenson was arrested, tried, and convicted. He served his time, was released, violated parole, was sent back to prison, then freed and moved south where he tried to abduct a 16-year-old girl.

“Officials there basically told him to pay this fine, get out of the state, and don’t come back,” says Ottinger. He married but never regained the prominence he once had. Jackson and Mayor Duvall lost their political clout. “I have a list of what happened to many of the people involved in the case. Several of the doctors who treated her went on to do amazing things. One of the doctors who treated her was the first one to start using insulin on patients. So, her death made a difference.”