Shawn Francis Peters couldn’t believe his luck. After writing 2012’s The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (Oxford University Press), the instructor in UW-Madison’s Integrated Liberal Studies Program was searching for an intriguing Upper Midwest-based true-crime subject when Harry Hayward entered his life.
Hayward, an infamous socialite and gambler in late 19th-century Minneapolis, was accused of plotting the December 1894 murder of 29-year-old dressmaker Catherine Ging. She was shot and thrown from a carriage after Hayward convinced her to loan him money and allowed him to take out a life insurance policy on her. The case captivated the nation and shone an ugly spotlight on a city transitioning from sleepy to gritty.
“I was sure somebody had written an entire book about him, and I can’t speculate why no one did,” Peters says. “I liked discovering the mystery and unraveling it. That was fun.”
So is reading The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press) — the first complete biography of Hayward, which oozes with elements of a hard-boiled historical detective novel.
Peters’ scholarly, yet accessible, prose takes readers into the shadowy corners of Minneapolis and the sinister mind of a “man without a soul,” as Hayward was deemed. This sordid tale is packed with mesmerism, psychopathy, spiritualism, yellow journalism and capital punishment.
“I don’t believe in supernatural powers, but Harry was a dynamic individual who could bend people to his will,” Peters, 52, says. “He was clearly a psychopath. People at that time did not understand how to explain that in scientific terms, so they thought it was something supernatural.”
Researching and writing a book about someone who practiced an early form of hypnotism and committed vile crimes almost 125 years ago presented challenges in separating fact from myth. “As I got to know Harry, I got to know his MO and things he would and would not do,” Peters says. “But Harry framed his brother by portraying him as mentally ill. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to do pretty much anything.”
A jury eventually found Hayward guilty of first-degree murder in the Ging case, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. He confessed to his role in the killing of Ging and three others. When Peters found a digitized copy of that confession via Google Books in an 1896 manuscript published by a Minneapolis-based company, “all of my senses were tingling,” he says. “I could have done the book without it, but now we have Harry’s narrative in his words.”
We also have newfound insight into a city that is now one of the largest and most diverse in the country.
“[The book] provides a window to a time and place when cities were becoming modern and changing in so many ways,” says Peters, whose wife, attorney Susan Crawford, recently won election to the Dane County Circuit Court. “Minneapolis was a frontier outpost not 25 years before the murder happened.”
Peters will read from and sign copies of The Infamous Harry Hayward June 7 at the Verona Public Library, 7 p.m. The event is sponsored by 702WI.