A Deadly Isle

Prussian immigrant Louis Wagner came to America hoping to make a better life for himself. Working as a fisherman in the Isle of Shoals it seemed he was living the dream, until he found himself down on his luck.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grimm and Mild from Air and Manky. The rugged New
England coastline has seen its fair share of tragedy. The
Isle of Shoals, a collection of nine rocky, treeless islands

(00:24):
off the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine, has been
cast in the starring role of the human dramas that
have played out across the centuries. The name of the
islands comes from two possible places, from the shallow shoals
long used for fishing in these waters, or the schools
of fish that swam heartily. When Europeans began showing up,

(00:46):
and with these colonizers, as it often happens, came new monikers.
Each jut of an island became re christiened with names
such as Star, White, Cedar, Apple Door, and the one
where our stories take place today Smutty Nose. The islands
proved to be a lucrative fishing hub in the early

(01:08):
sixteen hundreds, and by sixteen forty five as many as
six hundred people were braiding their harsh, windswept landscapes. It
was a place that required a certain sturdiness of character
and temperament, and attracted folks who could play that part.
It also attracted pirates. It was said that the lawless

(01:29):
islanders were happy to host these seafaring bandits, and legend
tells us that not only did their treasures still exist there,
but so do their ghosts. Author and resident Celia Thaxter
was among the people who wrote of these legends, telling
the story Philip Babb, the island's butcher and a rumored
pirate associate, who purportedly was so wicked in life that

(01:52):
there was speculation as to whether he could ever rest
in death. He supposedly dug a hole in the ground
of Apple Doore Island, where he and a friend found
a large treasure chest that stank of sulfur and gave
off smoke when they tried to open it. The famed
author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was trying to outrun his family's
association with the Salem witch trials just down the coastline,

(02:14):
recorded this tale in his journal, attesting that Celia's father
had seen this ghost with his own eyes. According to
one tale, a shoulder on Apple Door was out walking
one night when he spotted a man running toward him.
He assumed it was a friend trying to scare him,
but when the figure got closer it became clear that

(02:34):
it had a corpse's face and sunken eyes. The figure
then pulled a wicked looking knife from his belt and
held it high. It looked uncannily like the butcher's knife
that Philip was known to have carried with him. The shoulder,
of course, ran some say that this phantom is guarding
a treasure chest. It's also said that Philip was buried

(02:55):
somewhere near by. Could it be Blackbeard's treasure and some
think so. Rumors proliferate around the Isle as each island
claims to harbor the treasure itself. Blackbeard supposedly stranded his
wife there, though whether it was his thirteenth, fourteenth, or
fifteenth is still up for debate. Other pirates such as

(03:17):
ned Lowe, William Fly, and John Quelsh all passed through here,
with some such as George and Rachel Wall, settling down
to stay for a while. Even still, many of the
pirate legends that continue to live on here are just
that legends. There's no concrete evidence that Blackbeard even visited
the Isle of Shoals, but in one of the darkest

(03:39):
hours on the isle, one seafaring man proved to be
more fearsome than all legends and hauntings that call the
island's home. I'm Lord Bobobam. Welcome to American Shadows. By
the eighteenth seventies, the Isle of Shoals was experiencing a

(04:02):
slow trickle of change. It had long been a fishing hub,
but now tourism slowly began replacing tradition. A Smuttynose island
is rumored to have gotten its name from its shape,
which supposedly resembled the nose of a fearsome sea creature.
It had gained prominence as a workstation for passing ships,
featuring a compound that included a dock and warehouse, a

(04:26):
distillery and brewery, a boat house and hotel, a blacksmith
shop and windmill. Four fishermen who largely lived aboard their ships,
the island became a welcome reprieve where they could work
and play before continuing on back out into the cold
New England waters. If you can imagine a mirage in
the distance that could offer you anything you wanted, the

(04:48):
Smuttynose felt like that. To see worn sailors, but it
didn't disappear when they got close. The fishing industry, though,
would be decimated by the American Revolution and the following
War of eighteen twelve. Still the island did okay. Eventually,
the proprietor of the compound decided to build a three
story hotel four summer tourists, which he called the mid

(05:11):
Ocean House of Entertainment by the Lady. Teen hundreds wealthy
businessmen took a gamble on the islands, buying up huge
spaths of land, raising fishing cottages and building hotels for
tourists to rest in. On Smuttynose Island, only one family remained,
the Hoovetts and the Christiansens, a close knit group that
shared one red house surrounded by the sea, six miles

(05:35):
from the rugged New Hampshire coast line. John and Maren
had landed on the island first, then sent for Marren's sister,
Karen A. Karen had found work and lived at the
Apple Door Hotel. Eventually John's brother Matthew joined them and
together they tended to their fishing schooner, the Clarabella. Together
the family thrived on their island home not so much castaways,

(05:57):
as they were a motley crew of seagulls and seafaring peoples.
John was a good fisherman. He was eventually able to
invest in trawling equipment the cutting edge and favored fishing
pools of the day, and occasionally was able to hire
help aboard his boat. One of those men was a
handsome six foot tall Prussian immigrant named Louis Wagner. A

(06:20):
struggling boat hand, John was able to give him a
job and also a place to stay for a few
months from April through November of eighteen seventy two. Louis
ended up spending a lot of time in the home
with Maren due to his rheumatism. It said that they'd
got along famously and even became as close as siblings.
He eventually moved out, most likely to make room for

(06:42):
the arrival of Marin and Karen's half brother Ivan and
his wife Annette. It was hard for Lewis to find
work in nearby Portsmouth on the Mainland. Soon he was
sharing a cheap room in a boarding house with multiple
other men. Cash was hard to come by, and Brent,
as it always seems to, was coming due. As fortune

(07:03):
would have it, he ran into his old friends on
the Clarabella down at the docks on the night of
March fifth of eighteen seventy three. He asked John several
times over the course of their conversation whether they planned
on returning home to Smutty Nose that night. It's hard
to say now how this made John feel, but he
told Louis that yes, that had been the plan, but

(07:24):
now they were running behind schedule, waiting for a bait shipment,
and they were going to dock for the night. This
represented the second change of plans for the Clarabella that day. Originally,
on their way back from the open Ocean, they had
planned to stop on Smutty Nose to pick up Karen,
who wanted to do some shopping in Portsmouth. She was
dressed and waiting for her ride, having collected all of

(07:46):
the money for her goods and tucked a little white
button in her change purse in the hopes of finding
a matching one in town. But the winds had changed,
forcing John to bypass Karen and her plans and head
straight to port. They had sent word by another boat
that they would return to the island around ten that evening,
but now they had no way of telling them about

(08:07):
their second delay. John decided to make use of his
time on shore and offered Louis a little bit of
money to bait trolls. When the shipment finally arrived, Louis
said he would meet him back at the dock. When
the shipman arrived, John went looking for Louis, but he
never showed up. He was nowhere to be found. There

(08:34):
was a good reason John Houtvet couldn't find Louis Wagner
among the wares and weathered boarding houses of the Portsmouth waterfront.
It's because he wasn't there. Louis had left John with
a plan in mind. Around eight o'clock that night, he
located a small boat along the wharf and got in.
He unhitched himself, threaded the oars onto their locks, and

(08:56):
began to pull. Louis began to row up the Scataquas
River and out into the open sea, covering the ten
long miles to Smuttynose Island. It was a clear night,
with a three quarter moon hanging high. The three lighthouses,
all long cherished beacons of hope and security illuminated Lewis
in flashes as he went, and then the light could

(09:19):
no longer reach him. He was too far gone. Lewis's
plan seemed simple. He needed money, and he knew where
he could get cash. He knew that John had been
saving to buy a new boat, something they had talked
about at the docks, and like many on the aisle,
he knew that John kept his cash at home rather
than dealing with banks on the mainland. When he finally

(09:42):
landed on the island, he likely intended to burglarize the
house without disturbing Maren, Annette and Karen, who he supposed
had gone to bed long before his arrival. He was
surely thrilled and unsurprised to find that the front door
was unlatched and it popped open easily. He crept into
the dark house and slid into the kitchen. The candles

(10:05):
had all grown cold, and the stove's embers faded to
a whisper. Everything was dark. He noticed that Marin, whose
bedroom was off the kitchen, had left her door open,
and he quietly closed it and jammed the lock. But
he was no match for Canine's years. The family dog, Renya,
heard a noise and began to bark. The barking quickly

(10:28):
woke Karen, who was asleep on a cot in the kitchen.
She assumed that the men had returned home, and in
her haze, began to speak. Louis realized he was caught
in a flurry of panic. Not knowing what else to do,
he picked up a nearby chair and began to beat
Karen with it as she screamed, and they scuffled a
clock falling from the kitchen shelf. It stopped at one

(10:51):
oh seven a m Maren bolted upright in bed. She
blunched for her door, but found it jammed. The latch
eventually freed itself as as Karen screamed, a shouts of
John killed me, John killed me sliced the night's quiet.
Maren could only see a tall man, silhouetted by the moonlight,
holding a chair aloft with both hands. She grabbed Karen,

(11:13):
dragged her into the bedroom where a nette was, and
slammed the door behind them. Karen leaned against the door,
trying to figure out what to do next. And there
they were three women trapped and huddling in their night clothes.
Their only course of action was to try to jump
out the window and make a run for it. Karen

(11:33):
collapsed from her beating a Maren held her and convinced
a Nette that she had to try to escape. Nete
pushed open the window and climbed out, jumping down the
short distance into the fresh snow, but once there she froze.
Their attacker had stopped pounding at the door, and soon
Maren heard a new sound, a Nette's voice in the yard,

(11:55):
screaming Lewis Louis. The two were now illuminated by the
light of the moon, but it was clear as day
what was about to happen. He had been identified. This
certainly would spell his doom, so he made the decision
to retrieve an axe he had seen by the front door.
Maren could only watch through the window as Louis raised

(12:17):
the axe and began to strike Annette until she lay
dying in the snow. He headed back to the house's
front door, Now with a weapon in hand. Maren knew
her only option was to run as fast and far
as she could on their little island and find a
place to hide. But try as she might convince her
injured sister to follow her out the small window, Karen

(12:39):
couldn't muster the strength alone. Maren wrapped her night shirt
around her neck and ran barefoot out into the night.
Karen was now alone and save for Louis. As she
stumbled out into the house, attempting to hide under her bed,
Louis caught her, though, and strangled her with a white handkerchief.

(12:59):
Maren Can continued her run, searching for a place to hide.
She decided to try a small abandoned house near the water,
that is, until Rinya appeared. Afraid that the small dog
would bark and give them away, she ran past the
dilapidated building and to the island's coal Maybe she thought
she could find Louis's boat and escape, but it wasn't there.

(13:22):
There were no boats at all. There was nowhere to hide.
As she ran, she heard her sister cry out one
last time, and then saw a lamp and the house
turn on. The abandoned houses were going to be too
obvious to hide in. The risk was too high, so
she decided to stay hidden among the rocks. It would

(13:43):
turn out that Marin was right to choose the spot
that she did. Later, bloody footprints would show that Louis
had searched the island for her without success. He checked
every room in the closed mid Ocean House, hotel, opened
every door in the old store, and fish house and warehouse,
and it seems once his search turned up empty, he

(14:04):
returned to the house to find the money had come for.
He also made himself a cup of tea in the process.
In all, he came away with a total of sixteen
dollars roughly four hundred in a day's money. What he
didn't notice, though, as he grabbed the money from Karen's purse,
was the presence of a small white button among his

(14:25):
handful of coins. The sun rose again, but for Maren,
the nightmare continued. She waited until dawn to leave her
hiding place, afraid that Lewis was lying in wait for her.
When she heard the sound of workmen starting their day

(14:46):
a short distance away on Star Island, she began to
wave and jump and yell for their help. They noticed
her but did nothing. Maren took off along the sea wall,
where she would be inside of apple door, but just
a quarter mile across the frigid water. She continued to
wave and yell until she got the attention of the
children of one Yorga in Yebertsen, who were playing outside

(15:09):
in the morning sun. They alerted their dad, and he
quickly loaded into his doory across to Maren. He was
shocked by what he found. She was frostbitten and bruised,
clothing torn and frozen, and the only thing she could
say when he asked her what had happened was Lewis, Lewis, Lewis.

(15:31):
He trundled her into his boat and brought her to
his home, where Peebe, his wife, and their neighbor, Celia Thaxter,
tended to her. Her condition was so bad they worried
she was going to die. Yorga and two other fishermen
grabbed weapons and headed back to Smuttynose, prepared for a fight.
At this same moment, John, Matthew, and Ivan were all

(15:52):
heading back out again from Portsmouth. There trolls baited and
ready for another round of fishing, but as they approached
up people hailed them frantically. Matthew and Ivan hopped into
a dory and rowed ashore, where the news was broken
to them that Marin had been found near death, nearly
paralyzed with fear, and with a horrifying story to tell.

(16:15):
Brothers John and Matthew immediately set sail for Someboddy Nose
ivan stayed behind with Maren. When he asked her where
his wife, Annette was, all she could manage to tell
him was that she was still at home. He took
the dory and rode over to his island, where John
Matthew and the three other armed fishermen were standing outside
the home, a which was surrounded by blood soaked snow. Meanwhile,

(16:40):
Louis Wagner had managed to reach the mainland in his
stolen boat, abandoning it in a less traveled waterway in
nearby Newcastle. He was icy and sodden, conspicuous as he
walked bedraggled along the road back home to Portsmouth. He
was fidgeting, angry and nervous, and unable to eat anything.
When he found only arrived back at his boarding house.

(17:02):
He made several strange comments to those who saw him
at home that morning, including that he was in trouble
and that he was afraid he was going to be
taken in. He cleaned out his room and left without
paying his overdue rent. By that afternoon, he had spent
most of his stolen money on a shave, a hair cut,
a new set of clothes, and a one way train

(17:23):
ticket to Boston. Once there, he went to a boarding
house where he had once lived and asked the owners
if he could stay on credit. By now the police
were already on the case, and they didn't have to
look very hard to find him. They apprehended him at
this old address. Though he quickly denied any involvement in
what had happened on Smuttynose Island. He was taken to jail,

(17:46):
and news quickly spread in the papers and through the streets.
A one newspaper report claimed that as many as ten
thousand people poured into the streets of Portsmouth hoping to
enact some mob justice. A one headline read fisherman vow vengeance.
Another said the fishermen that the shoals are terribly excited
should Wagner fall into their hands while there. In their

(18:08):
present temper, he could hardly escape being torn into pieces. John,
Matthew and Ivan, who had lost almost their whole family
that night, soon arrived to see Louis in jail. He
denied his crime to their faces. John screamed that he
ought to be cut to pieces and used as fishing bait.

(18:28):
The person who waited to come was Maren. She did eventually,
though she had to be carried in. She was in
bad shape but mustered everything she could to face Lewis down.
A man who had once been something of a brother
had killed her family and tried to kill her too,
as she knew it, yet he continued to deny it.

(18:50):
The betrayal, the horror was almost too much to bear.
On March twelfth, it was decided there was enough evidence
to charge him with murder, just three days after the
funerals of Karen and Annette. Throughout his trial in June
of eighteen seventy three, he continued to proclaim innocence. It

(19:10):
became a local sensation and in the public opinion he
was already good and guilty and hanged. Spectators packed the
courtroom from all over New England. It was the biggest
event of the year. The crowd hung on the witnesses
every word. Maren was the unwilling and unfortunate star of
the show, reliving the worst night of her life in

(19:31):
excruciating detail for the courts. Over twenty people were called
to attest to Lewis's actions on the days leading up
to the murders. And then there was the physical evidence.
The bloody shirt dumped into the boarding house pretty, his
bloodied and blistered hands and one small white button in
his possession, Lewis's alibi fell short. He denied making any

(19:54):
strange statements and attempted to cast suspicion on others, including
John himself, wept that he was falsely accused. On June
twenty fourth, he was sentenced to death by hanging. He
appeared to take it in stride because he had one
more plan. The cell locks in the jail in which
he was held had been installed incorrectly. The jailers knew

(20:18):
that he could get out, but he promised them that
he'd stay in. He broke that promise and took two
other prisoners with him that night. His freedom wouldn't last long,
though he was apprehended three days later. Tired, hungry, and disheveled,
he talked about wanting a vacation and continued to deny

(20:38):
his crime until he hung the following June. The people
of the shoals they tried to continue on, but life
on Smutty Nose was forever changed. Maryn John, and Matthew
immediately left for the safe harbors of Portsmouth. Ivan took
up work on Appleedore Island before eventually moving back to Norway.

(20:58):
As for their little red house, it would never be
the same. It was no longer filled with life and family,
a holdout of a changing world. By the summer after
the murders, with new hotels on nearby islands ramping up business,
the murder scene became a tourist traction. The stories of

(21:23):
what happened on Smutty Nose Island eventually evolved from simple
news into history and legend. Celia Thaxter, one of the
women who comforted Maren in the wake of this tragedy,
was a well known poet with a firm standing in
the Isle community. In fact, her family owned Smutty Nose,
effectively making her the bed's landlords. In the days after

(21:47):
the murders, she wrote a letter to a friend describing
everything that Marin had told her, and in May of
eighteen seventy five, just a month before Lewis was hanged,
Celia published an article entitled an Amiable Murder in the
Atlantic Monthly. A copy was delivered to Lewis and his
cell and he said that Celia was simply telling lies

(22:08):
to make money, but really what Celia did was pen
a cornerstone piece in the canon of American true crime writing.
Unlike many contemporary newspaper accounts, which delighted in the blood
and gore of a crime, Celia wrote about the world
of Norwegian immigrants and those who were left behind in

(22:28):
the wake of the killings. It was a work of humanity,
something that's not often afforded to victims or their families.
Her personal letters revealed that she agonized over whether writing
about the murders was in poor taste. She intentionally focused
on the lives of Karen and Annette, reanimating them as

(22:49):
flesh and blood, living and breathing characters, not just inert corpses.
The story of these lost lives continues to echo through history.
The way that they were written about and remembered continues
to shape the media we consume today. A scholar's credit
her article with being a direct influence on the modern

(23:11):
genre of true crime, especially in the case of Truman capotees.
In Cold Blood. Karen and Annette might not be household names,
but it can be argued that their fingerprints remain. There's
more to this story. Stick around after this brief sponsor
break to hear all about it. There's a particular literary

(23:42):
canon that's existed in American high school classrooms for a
long time now, and if you went to school in
the States, you've probably read the likes of Catcher and
the Rye by J. D. Salinger or Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee. There's another book that continues to set
its apart as a foundational literary text for young minds,

(24:04):
The Harrowing Tale of the Lord of the Flies. Published
in nineteen fifty four, it was the debut novel of
British author William Golding, who would go on to win
a Nobel Prize. It details the story of British schoolboys
marooned on a desert island and what unfolds is they
try to establish a system of self governance. It's chaotic,

(24:27):
it's dark. It asks readers to deeply interrogate their own
morals and whether the ending is a happy one. Well,
it's hard to say. It's a novel, yes, but stories
of being marooned on islands can be found the world over,
from the long past through the present, and sometimes the

(24:47):
truth of these tales provides an outcome that fiction writers
could only dream of. On an evening in June of
nineteen sixty five, six boys stole a boat. They intended
to go for a ride. After all, their strict Catholic
boarding school in the Kingdom of Tonga left much to
be desired in the way of entertainment. The boys, ages

(25:09):
thirteen to sixteen, planned to sail five hundred miles to Fiji, or,
if they were feeling daring and in good spirits by
the time they arrived, even further on to New Zealand. Unfortunately,
they didn't have much experience in long haul sailing, nor
did they have the supplies they needed to make such track.
Their packing list was slim and just two sacks of bananas,

(25:32):
a few coconuts, and a small gas burner. Notably missing
were any maps or compasses. However, they all fell asleep
that night, and when they woke up, it was to
a storm that sent giant waves crashing over their boat.
When they hoisted their only sail, the wind quickly demolished it,
and their rudder also broke with the force of the gale.

(25:56):
For eight days, the boys drifted in the South Pacific
with no land in sight, attempting to catch fish and
rain water. The boat, which was leaking, barely stayed afloat.
Despite their concerted efforts to bail it out. Finally, they
spotted an island roughly ninety miles from where they had begun.
It was Ata, which had been uninhabited since a Peruvian

(26:19):
enslaver ship had kidnapped almost all of its peoples in
eighteen sixty two. The boys employed planks to swim ashore,
at which they reached after an exhausting day of paddling.
At first, they dug a shallow cave in the island's
cliffs and survived mainly by catching and eating sea birds
and their eggs, as well as raw fish and coconut shoots.

(26:40):
After several months, they were able to climb up to
the long dormant volcanic crater at the island center, where
people had lived one hundred years before. They discovered a
pair of rusty knives left behind by Atta's last inhabitants,
and with them were able to build a shelter. Not
knowing when or if they'd be rescued, the boys set

(27:02):
up an island society on Atta that bore no resemblance
to William Golding's story. They took turns cooking, tending their garden,
and carefully keeping their ever lit fire. Over time, they
were able to construct pens for chickens, as well as
a recreational area with a badminton court and weightlifting. One
of the boys crafted the guitar from coconuts, driftwood and

(27:24):
salvaged wire. They sang and prayed every morning and evening,
and composed songs to sing together. When another boy fell
off a cliff and broke his leg, the others splinted
it and took over his chores. They would end each
day with a council and have a chance to air
any grievances before the night was done. And it went

(27:45):
this way for many months. In early September of nineteen
sixty six, a fishing boat called the Just David, captained
by Australian Peter Warner, was out searching for new crayfishing grounds.
When they passed Atta A Warner noticed some unusual burnt
patches on the islands of Verdant Cliffs. Above the screams

(28:06):
of sea birds. Just David's lookout insisted that he heard
a human voice yelling. Warner, who had confirmed with a
book on board that the island was uninhabited, was skeptical,
but that skepticism evaporated when they saw someone running down
a cliff path and diving into the water, shouting all
the while. He swam for the boat, and a naked

(28:27):
teenager climbed aboard, telling them a harrowing story Warner could
barely believe. The rest of the boys came too, telling
the tale of their innocent outing gone horribly wrong. Warner
was worried that they might be escaped criminals, but when
he radioed Tonga with their names, he was met with tears.

(28:48):
It was assumed that all of the boys had died.
The boys reunited with their families, and the King of
Tonga granted Warner fishing rights and permission to start a
business on the island. Then hired all six boys as
crew on his new boat, which was named Ata, after
the island they had spent fifteen months on. He figured

(29:09):
that if they could live together for all this time,
working to support each other and stay alive, they were
exactly the kind of people that he probably wanted to
work with too. American Shadows as hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum.

(29:30):
This episode was written by Robin Miniatter, researched by Robin
Minatter and Cassandra de Alba, and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams,
and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit
grimminmile dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.