Franz Frehr, 82, and his wife, Johanna, 84, had lived in a house on Jefferson St. in Buffalo since moving to the U.S. from Germany more than half a century earlier.
Franz operated his cabinet-making business for decades on the first floor of the two-story frame home. By 1903, his work life was behind him. His activities centered on chores, errands, and caring for Johanna, who was too frail to walk.
Their modest ways fueled rumors that they were hiding a great deal of cash in the house, a fortune accumulated over decades of hard work and little spending. Friends and neighbors worried that these rumors could attract dangerous young ruffians who might harm them and steal the money.
They were partially right. But the agent of the couple’s doom turned out to be a predator as wrinkled and gray as they were.
In mid-November, the house fell silent, and neither Franz nor Johanna appeared outside or near the windows. Then, on Nov. 21, a moving van stopped at the address, and a tall, elderly stranger started to unload furniture.
The man introduced himself to a curious neighbor as Charles Bonier and said he was an old friend from Germany. He said the Frehrs wanted to move into an old-age home, so they sold him the house and another property they owned a few blocks away.
Bonier said he would live in the Jefferson St. home with his housekeeper and her two young children.
Asked where the Frehrs had gone, Bonier said he did not know their new residence or how to reach them. All he could say was that they went away in a carriage.
New York Daily News on March 27, 1932
The couple had two grown daughters and grandchildren, along with nieces and nephews who regularly stopped by, as did some neighbors. No one recalled Franz or Johanna saying anything about selling the house or an old-age home.
Within a few days, three grandchildren, ages 20 to 17, visited the house and demanded that Bonier tell them where their grandparents were.
“It’s none of your business,” Bonier snapped.
This encounter became one of many troubling incidents reported to police who soon opened an investigation.
Detectives asked Bonier to show them the deeds. He said they had been drawn up by a notary that Frehr hired and were in the county clerk’s office.
But it soon became clear that the documents were forgeries, signed by Bonier, who tried to bribe a notary to say they were legitimate. The notary refused and went to the police, but Bonier disappeared before they could make an arrest.
A search of the house turned up a bloodstained pair of trousers that belonged to Bonier, suggesting that the Frehrs were dead and their bodies hidden on the property. The searchers turned their attention to a makeshift shed in the yard and started digging in the dirt floor. They soon hit something hard—a layer of sheet iron.
Underneath they found the frozen corpses of Franz and Johanna Frehr. Their heads appeared to have been bashed in with a hammer that lay near the bodies.
The Buffalo Evening News observed that the husband’s face was battered, but appeared peaceful, as if the first blow knocked him out. Johanna’s face was frozen in terror, with “starting eyes and the feature graven with the superlative of fear and horror.”
As a manhunt got underway, detectives found an important clue to his whereabouts — a bundle of letters from a widow who lived in Erie, Pa. They quickly tracked him down and arrested him in a seedy hotel in that city.
He told police he had run away to look for the Frehrs so they could confirm that they had sold him the property. When police told him that they had been found dead in the yard at the Jefferson St. house, he laughed.
“I am too old. I couldn’t have killed them,” he said.
At his trial in January 1904, the district attorney told of how Bonier had come to Buffalo and tried to rent a room from the Frehrs. When they said no, he started badgering them to sell him the property. One problem: He had no money.
Retracing his history, investigators discovered he had been married and had a farm in Gardenville. Sometime in the 1880s, he sold the farm, and after that, no one could recall him doing a day’s work. Everyone who knew him said he was always penniless.
When his wife died in 1902, he landed in Buffalo.
Bonier told the court that Franz had agreed to sell both properties for $3,200. Instead of finding someone to draft a deed, the two old men went out to dig up celery. Later, he forged the paperwork after the couple disappeared.
Louisa Lindholm, the housekeeper, proved to be an important witness for the prosecution. Lindholm told the court about finding a satchel containing about $500 in cash (roughly $18,000 today), a wallet, and a bank book belonging to the Frehrs. Bonier said the money was his.
All the evidence against Bonier was circumstantial, but it wrapped “the coils of doom” around the defendant, as the Buffalo Evening News noted.
Bonier showed no emotion as the jury delivered the verdict: Guilty of first-degree murder, which meant a death sentence. An appeal led to a second trial, with the same outcome.
On July 31, 1907, he walked calmly to his execution at the prison in Auburn, N.Y.
At nearly 78, with a full head of hair and beard white as snow, as newspapers reported, Bonier earned a dubious place in history — the oldest man to die in the electric chair in New York State.