Lakewood Lore

Love, money create murder mystery

Through the years, Lakewood has been a comparatively quiet community. However, a murder here, 70 years ago this week, became known as one of the most celebrated crimes in American history.

It had the dark dimensions of a dime novel - an evil plot, bloody violence and a long, undaunted search for the perpetrators. Furthermore, it was ballyhooed as the only case on record where a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter all were indicted for murder.

The victim was Dan Kaber, a wealthy 46-year-old publisher who had been paralyzed for a long time. He was stabbed 24 times in an upstairs sickroom in his mansion on Lake Avenue just west of Cove, shortly before midnight on July 18, 1919.

His male nurse, who heard Kaber's screams, found him covered with blood. When police arrived, Kaber repeatedly told them, "My wife ordered this done."

Wife Eva Kaber had gone to Cedar Point two days earlier to visit a friend, but there were two other members of the family in the house at the time - Eva's mother, Mary Brickel, and the victim's stepdaughter, Marian McArdle, 19. Both of these women denied seeing or hearing any intruder.

The weapon, a dagger made from a file, was found in the room, and it was discovered that silverware was missing from a downstairs buffet.

Dan Kaber died the next day in Lakewood Hospital. A postmortem revealed that he had enough arsenic in his body to kill 20 men.

When police bogged down on the case after months of investigation, the murdered man's father, old Moses Kaber, was so determined to find the assassins that he sought the help of Pinkerton Detective Agency.

In 1921, nearly two years after Kaber's death, one of the Pinkerton operatives, who had befriended Brickel, reported hearing the mother say, while being protective of her innocent son Charles, "If they try to put it on Charlie, I'll tell all I know."

The remark led newly elected County Prosecutor Edward C. Stanton to request that Brickel and Charles come to his office.

Charles was asked in first. Then, as the youth was being ushered out and the mother was being brought in, Stanton, putting into play a ploy, called out, "Throw him in jail. He's the one who did it all right."

The deceptive strategy paid off. Hearing and believing Stanton's bluff, Brickel immediately declared that it was her daughter, Eve, who planned the murder.

Brickel confessed that she herself had left the side door open for the murderers and that Marian had pried open the buffet drawer with an ice pick to make it look like a burglary.

As the plot unfolded, police learned that initially Eva Kaber obtained arsenic from a woman named Emma Colavito to put into her husband's soup. When that failed to kill him, Kaber arranged through Colavito to hire two assassins, Salvatore Cala and Vittorio Pisselli, for $5,000.

Money and passionate love for a New York City man combined to form Mrs. Kaber's motive. Found guilty on July 17, 1921, she was sentenced to life imprisonment in Marysville Reformatory for Women, where her unruliness earned her the title of "Ohio's Worst Prisoner." She died there several years later.

Cala was given a life term in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Mary Brickel and Marian McArdle were freed.

Cala's accomplice, Pissella, fled to Italy, but was captured by two Cleveland detectives who had been provided funds by Moses Kaber to go abroad and catch the culprit. Pissella got 20 years of hard labor.

Colavito, oddly enough, was acquitted in the Kaber scandal. However, in 1924, she got her just desserts, as they say in sermonizing circles, when she was sentenced to life imprisonment for furnishing arsenic to kill somebody else in another murder case.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post July 20,1989. Reprinted with permission.

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