Billings’ unsolved, century-old axe murders (continued)

Let’s travel back to early December 1924 and envision this scene: a drifter, or hobo as his type was commonly called then, has stepped off a freight train in the busy railroad yards of Billings. He might have arrived on the Northern Pacific line, coming from the east as far away as the Twin Cities or from the west, anywhere between Seattle and Montana. Or, he could have hopped a ride on the Burlington Route, coming from the southeast as far away as Missouri and traveling through Wyoming to Montana. It’s also possible he rode the Great Northern, which traversed the Montana Hi-Line en route to Seattle and which had a spur line south to Billings. Thirty passenger trains came through Billings daily in the summer of 1924.

Standing a few minutes in the heart of Billings, he surveyed the bustling city, then randomly started walking south.

He spotted a street sign that read “Minnesota Avenue” for the east-west route and “South 29th Street” for the north-south one. Without giving it much thought since he had never been to Billings before, he ambled west along the south side of Minnesota Avenue. About halfway along the block, he spotted a business. The sign read “Men’s Barber Shop” and “Women’s Marcel Parlor.”

It was late on a Saturday afternoon when he entered the business operated by Nels and Annie Anderson, who had gone next door to Kirk’s Grocery to pick up some items.

The stranger crept behind Nels Anderson as he sat in a barber chair and grabbed an ax left leaning against the wood-burning stove that heated the shop. He raised the ax and lowered it; with a single blow, he killed Nels.

Just then, Annie Anderson returned and saw the grisly scene. She tried to flee, but the stranger caught her and used three blows with the ax to kill her.

When police discovered the crime scene the next day, they “stumbled over the body of Mrs. Anderson lying face down in a pool of blood.”

Near her was the ax, “its blade red with congealed blood, in which strands of hair were matted.” Officers’ gaze also took in the chair near the back of the shop where the murderer had left Nels’ body. The gruesome newspaper description said his “head dropped to the left side, with a deep gash over the right ear, the hands hanging limply down.

“Anderson’s head was split from crown to the roof of his mouth, while that of his wife bore at least three ax wounds, the deepest of which almost split the skull in twain.”

Robbery wasn’t the motive for the killing, lawmen concluded, but they couldn’t determine any other reason. One former sheriff said some speculated that a local businessman, a patron of Anderson’s barber shop, committed the crime.

Anderson purportedly kidded the businessman once about several “successful fires” that had occurred in his stores. The businessman recovered profitably after each.

Apparently, when Anderson made the joke a day or so before his death, it angered the businessman, who stormed out of the shop. No one ever implicated him in the crime.

There were no witnesses and thus we have no first-hand account of what happened on December 6, 1924, at 2912 Minnesota Avenue. The account of the killing above was drawn from the author’s imagination, which was based on newspaper accounts and other archival material from the time.

Not until a day later, on Sunday, December 7, 1924, was the double-ax murder that shocked Billings and Montana discovered. Police forensics, notably fingerprinting, were in the early stage of development then, and authorities tried but could not get prints that might have helped them track down the murderer. The killings of Nels and Annie Anderson were never solved, and they rank as the oldest cold case in Montana history.

(This is the start of my current writing project, the true story of a gruesome crime that happened on that late fall day a century ago.

Even though their grandparents, and in some cases great-grandparents, were victims of a brutal killing a century ago, members of the Anderson family haven’t forgotten Nels and Annie. Nor have they neglected to honor the legacy of the couple.

Family members scattered across the Midwest and West planned to come to Billings over the weekend of December 6, 2024, to mark the 100th anniversary of the crime. Illness, however, caused all the family members except one to cancel those plans. The family still plans to get together in Billings in June 2025 to remember their murdered ancestors.

The family member who did make it to Billings in December 2024 was Glenn Pomeroy, from Sacramento, California. He was the youngest child of Myrtle (Anderson) Pomeroy, who was the youngest child of Nels and Annie; she was four when her parents were taken from her and she lived to be 93 before passing away in 2013.

While in Billings, Glenn visited the 1920-vintage home on Custer Avenue that his grandparents owned and where they were raising their four children in 1924. Then, he went to the city’s historic Mountview Cemetery and placed poinsettias and a candle on Nels and Annie’s gravesites.

“It was really emotional,” Pomeroy said in a phone interview with me after his first visit to the cemetery since 1988. The crime took place so long ago that no one alive knows the couple. “It had such a profound effect on the children, my mother being one, that it seemed appropriate to reflect on it.”

He stated the obvious, but it was worth saying: “None of us would be on earth if not for them.”

Others have lost relatives in traumatic ways, such as car accidents, in combat, and so forth, but Nels and Annie died in a “horrific” way that makes remembering them especially appropriate, Pomeroy said. And their life in Billings, their hometown then for about four years, seemed so promising. Nels was 42 when he died, and Annie was 41, and besides their young family, with children ranging in age from ten to four, they had a new home, a car, and a business of their own where both worked. They even had a shed behind the house where they kept a horse.

“There’s a fair amount of sadness involved in it,” Pomeroy said of his visit. His thoughts also involved his mother, who was widowed at age fifty-one, and who he said “was such a graceful person.”

“It was a pretty rich blend of emotions. I was glad to be there; it was such a pivotal thing in our lives.”

Pomeroy acknowledged the almost non-existent likelihood that the crime will be solved, and if it were, that would have minimal effect on him.

Even if someone came forward and said their grandfather committed the murder, a confession of sorts at this late date wouldn’t mean much to him. “Closure is not a word with meaning to me in this context. The identity of the killer is not central to me in how I think about this.”