The Tale of Katie Bredehoft or How to Conduct an Investigation

 By Rachel Dworkin, archivist

Bredehoft marker, 2026

 

On April 14, 2026, the Chemung County Historical Society unveiled our latest historic marker on Bancroft Road. It marks the spot where a group of boys found the body of Katie Bredehoft in the creek under a bridge on January 6, 1884. She had been murdered there by her fiancé William Menken two days earlier. Bredehoft was a German immigrant and resident of New York City. She had been in Elmira for less than a week at the time of her murder. Upon learning of her story, I wondered how the police had ever identified her, let alone solved her murder.

 

Sketch of crime scene from Elmira Advertiser, 1884

Police today have a number of advantages when it comes to identifying unknown victims. For fresher finds, there are fingerprints. They were first used in 1882 as part of a wider system of biometric data on people being arrested collected by the Paris police department by clerk Alphonse Bertillon. By 1892, a detective in Buenos Aires, Argentina, had successfully used fingerprints found at a crime scene to identify a suspect. By the 1900s, fingerprinting became widely used. In 1999, the United States introduced the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). The database, which is maintained by the FBI, contains fingerprints from convicted criminals, as well as anyone fingerprinted for employment, immigration, or other purposes. Today, one out of every six Americans is in the IAFIS database. As an immigrant, Katie Bredehoft would have been in the database if she were murdered today.

DNA is another valuable tool. Like fingerprints, everyone’s DNA is distinct. Unlike fingerprints, however, the DNA of related individuals is similar enough that unidentified victims can be identified through their relatives. In 1998, the FBI launched CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), a national DNA database that includes convicted criminals, missing persons, and families of missing persons. Since 2020, immigrants have also been required to submit DNA samples for CODIS. In addition to using governmental databases, there are a couple of cases where police departments across the nation have turned to commercial DNA databases to identify both victims and criminals. In 2017, investigators used the personal genomics website GEDmatch to identify the family of the Golden State Killer, eventually leading to the conviction of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. In 2023, police in San Diego used 23andme to find the relatives of an unidentified woman killed in 1986.

In addition to fingerprints and DNA, since 2005, the FBI has maintained a database of dental records called the National Dental Image/Information Repository (NDIR). The database contains dental records of known missing persons and unidentified remains. When someone is reported missing by their family, the police request their records and upload them to the database. When an unidentified body is found, x-rays of their teeth are crosschecked against the database. While a modern Katie Bredehoft would have been in IAFIS and CODIS, she was never reported missing. She and her killer, William Menken, were supposed to be heading to their wedding in Baltimore.

Of course, the detectives handling the Bredehoft investigation in 1884 didn’t have access to any of those technologies and database. Instead, they relied on the public to help identify her. On the Monday after her body was removed from the ice, it was taken to the morgue where literally hundreds of people were invited to come view it. She was placed, frozen, in a doorway adjacent to a hallway through which the viewers would pass. On the Wednesday following her discovery, local photographer Charles Tomlinson took a series of photographs of her face and body.

In the end, the method bore fruit. Mrs. Tubbs, a housekeeper at the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western train depot, recognized Bredehoft as one half of a couple that she had seen getting off a train the morning of January 2nd. Another woman, Mrs. Kelly, who ran an eatery where the couple had stopped for lunch on the day of the murder, also recognized Bredehoft. Moreover, she provided the clue that lead to the identification of her killer. William Menken had a nasty scar and glass eye. While at Kelly’s eatery, he asked her if Norton still lived in the area.

Sketch of Menken & Bredehoft from Sunday Tidings, 1884

 

As it turned out, William Menken had been imprisoned at the Elmira Reformatory for burglary until 1882 when he was paroled to work under supervision at the nearby Norton farm. Thanks to the carefully maintained records at the Reformatory, officials were able to quickly identify Menken as the man seen with their unidentified victim. They tracked him to his sister’s home in Flatbush, New York. Detectives in New York City quickly learned that Menken had been courting a Miss Katie Bredehoft. Using Tomlinson’s photographs, her younger sister, Mary, confirmed that the body found in Elmira was that of her sister. Within four days after the discovery of her body, the police had found her killer and successfully identified her body thanks, not to forensic technologies or databases, but to the power of crowd sourcing.

Menken was tried and convicted twice for the murder. The first time was in Elmira, but verdict was thrown out when it was learned that the jury had gone to inspect the crime scene themselves. A new jury was impaneled in December 1884 in Binghamton. They too found him guilty. He was hanged on July 2, 1885.