It was April 23, 1960, about 12:30 a.m. Edwin Smith was driving home, heading north along North Plankinton Avenue. As he passed the 400 block, between Clybourn and St. Paul avenues, he heard a woman crying out for help. He stopped his car and rushed to a nearby alleyway. There, he found 76-year-old Ida Lowry, badly beaten and covered in blood. He tried to lift the poor woman, but she screamed in agony. He ran off and phoned the police. Just over an hour later, the woman died at a nearby hospital.
The murder of Ida Lowry was one of the most horrific crimes in the city’s recent memory. She had been grabbed off the street, pulled into the alley and brutally raped. She was beaten and sexually assaulted with a blunt object, and left in the dirt to die. Talking to police, she could only say that her assailant had been a “big, white man” who “works at the bridge.” She estimated that she had laid in the alley for about 15 minutes between the attack and Smith happening upon her. She could provide no other information about the crime.
The search for her killer began just after she passed away. Officers combed the alleyway where she was found looking for clues, but came up with little of any use. Beyond her vague description, there was nothing to indicate who had committed the awful act. In trying to piece together a profile of who Ida Lowry was, the police encountered even more mysteries.
As a younger woman, Lowry worked as an office assistant. Her husband Walter worked for International Harvester. The couple had no children, but was otherwise a fairly typical middle class family. After Walter died in 1950, Ida drifted into the life of a loner and had grown increasingly eccentric. By 1960, she was living at the Hotel Royal at 435 W. Michigan St. She was known by sight to many people in the area. She dressed in odd, layered and mismatched clothing and gloves. She stalked through alleyways to pick through trashcans and dumpsters. She was known as a “rag picker” and a “scavenger” who would spend hours pulling clothes and other items from the garbage. Unlike most pickers in the city, she was never seen selling any of the things she recovered. To most she was an odd, but harmless, character.
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Divers search the Milwaukee River for clues near where Ida Lowry was found.
Police searched her meager room at the Royal and uncovered a stack of worthless stock certificates and keys to two safe deposit boxes at local banks. A dozen detectives were working the case, canvassing the state for excepted mental patients and checking up on area men previously suspected of sex crimes. Lowry’s only family was two sisters. One had not seen her in months; the other—whom Lowry often visited at her South Third Street home—had not seen her in a few weeks. Neither had useful information for the police. Both said that their sister confided little to them. The last person to see her before the attack was the elevator operator at the Royal, who said she left her room at about 10 p.m. the night of her death. It was not uncommon for her to leave at such an hour.
Within a few days of the attack, police had talked to six different men considered to be suspects. The most interesting was a man who had been arrested for drunkenness near the crime scene about a week prior. He had formerly worked at a railroad bridge and fit Lowry’s vague description. A search of his apartment turned up a set of bloody clothes. Tests on the clothes, however, found that the blood did not match that of Lowry. Police determined that the man’s alibi—that he had been at home drinking for the last several days and the blood came from an injury sustained trying to open a bottle—was true.
Meanwhile, the case took another bizarre turn when police opened Lowry’s safe deposit boxes. The first was empty. But the second, at the M&I Bank on West Wisconsin Ave., contained over $17,000 in cash. Why was Ida Lowry living a transient’s life, picking through the trash and unable to keep up with her $10 a week rent at the Royal while she was, by all measures, a wealthy woman? It was a question that no one could answer definitively.
A week after the crime, a 24-year-old man being held on a drunk and disorderly charge admitted to police that he might have committed the crime. He said he was in the area at the time of the murder and was prone to long periods of alcohol-induced amnesia. The year before, he had been convicted of an attempted rape on a woman committed in nearly the same way the Lowry rape was committed. But, once again, analysis of his clothes by the state crime lab eliminated him as a suspect.
A handful of other men were questioned in the matter over the coming weeks, but none could be held as suspects. As the years passed, the Lowry case became one of the city’s most notorious unsolved murders. It remains today an open file with the Milwaukee Police Department.
