Murders remain unsolved some 80 years later

By Jeremiah Tucker, Sauk Prairie Eagle

To everyone involved, it looked as if Mary Balzer ran for her life.

She lived about 8 miles outside Sauk City in a farmhouse with her two brothers on a quiet stretch of Highway 60.

The night of August 8, 1922 was a full moon, giving the 65-year-old woman sufficient light to chart a break toward safety.

Halfway dressed and likely in a state of panic and screaming, she almost made it.

The next day her neighbor, Henry Meng, found her bludgeoned body lying in the weeds near his mailbox, about 300 feet from her home.

In the days that followed, the details of the gruesome murders of Mary and her brothers William and Julius shocked the insular community of Cassell Prairie in the town of Troy, and as the years passed with no arrests and no significant leads, the murders of the elderly Balzer siblings slipped into local lore — becoming the kind of scary story one might tell on a Halloween night.

 

A religious family

In his book "Cassell Prairie: A Wisconsin Neighborhood," Robert Babington described the Cassell community as a group of farmsteads settled in 1844 that by the time he wrote his book in 1950 had been declining in population for years.

"Cassell Prairie is located in southern Sauk County," Babington wrote. "On the north it is bounded by a range of bluffs, breaking toward the south into lime-capped sandstone cliffs.

On the south it is bounded by the Wisconsin River, while at both the east and west end the range of bluffs and the flood plain of the river meet."

He reserved only a paragraph in his book for the murder of the Balzer family, describing them as "good neighbors and peace loving citizens who never harmed anyone."

At the time of their murders, they'd lived in the home for 50 years.

William, the oldest, was 69 years old and Julius, 59, was the youngest. Mary was the middle child.

They were members of the First Reformed Church of Sauk City and their neighbors described them as religious people distrustful of banks.

A well-known rumor in the community was that they hoarded their wealth.

According to a news story republished in the 2007 book "Troy Tales and Trails," neighbors described them as friendly but somewhat reclusive and wary of visitors.

 

Vicious attack

When there was a knock on their door around 10 p.m on a Tuesday night, it would've been the men of the house who answered. Mary already was preparing for bed.

At the door the brothers probably encountered a man, or perhaps two men, with a story about a stranded automobile.

Julius grabbed a lantern and together the men walked to the garage.

As the brothers rummaged to retrieve some tools — Julius holding a tire iron — their heads were bashed in with a hammer.

The youngest Balzer brother, a strong, broad-shouldered man, likely put up a fight, due to the numerous blows to his head, which reduced it to pulp.

William staggered around the car, eventually crawling beneath it. Julius collapsed dead on the lantern.

Blood was everywhere, smeared on the windshield, the hood and the spare tire strapped to the car's right side.

William died a few weeks later.

Mary either heard her brothers struggling for their lives and took off running, or the murderers spooked her as they entered the house.

Maybe the brothers cried out as the hammer fell upon them or perhaps Mary screamed as she fled in the moonlight.

At some point during the night Meng, the Balzers' neighbor, woke up because his dog began to bark.

He got out of bed and heard noises down the road, but assumed it was tourists passing in the night and went back to sleep.

 

Police left without leads

When William was found almost 24 hours later, he was still alive and under the car. His face was covered in motor oil and the back of his skull was mostly gone.

He was unable to tell authorities anything reliable before his death.

Much of the house was undisturbed, although Mary's mattress and pillow were slit open.

Some bureaus were overturned and two empty pocketbooks were found.

A Milwaukee detective was brought in and police in Chicago were involved but all the initial leads failed to uncover any promising suspects.

In 1925 some bonds belonging to the Balzers were cashed in by former farm hands, but the men had alibis for the night of Aug. 8, 1922, and the Sauk County District Attorney was convinced that they took the bonds from their hiding place after the murders.

In 1927, Platteville resident William Coffey murdered his wife in a similar fashion, beating her to death with first a baseball bat and then a hammer.

According to former Wisconsin State Journal reporter Marv Balousek's book "50 Wisconsin Crimes of the Century," investigators interviewed Coffey, a bond salesman, for hours about the Balzer murders, but while he admitted to being in the Sauk City area at the time, he denied any involvement.

Coffey died in prison in 1962 and never confessed to any role in the Sauk City murders.

Case goes cold

 

In his 1950 book about Cassell Prairie, Babington wrote of the Balzer family, "The unprovoked and brutal murders were a profound shock to the community, which has not yet lost hope that the perpetrators will some day be apprehended and punished."

They never were.

Almost 90 years later, the Balzer murders remain unsolved and likely will remain so with the murderer(s) and potential witnesses presumably long dead.

But people haven't forgotten them.

"The Balzer murders are one of the most requested," said Mary Farrell-Stieve, who oversees the Sauk County Historical Society's files on notorious murders.

The Balzer house still stands on Highway 60, having been in Elaine Hornung's family for more than half a century now.

Elaine's husband, Ken Hornung, said they rent out the house, and live in a newer home on the property.

He said the last time anyone came by asking about the murders was 20 years ago when a Madison television station did a short documentary on the unsolved case.

"Some of the old timers were interviewed that was around here," he said.

Those old timers are dead now. The garage where the Balzer brothers were murdered was torn down long ago, before it even entered Elaine's family.

In all his decades on the farm, Ken said he hasn't come across any evidence of the Balzer family — or their ghosts.

"No, there was no unusual stuff at all," he said.