Court History is a Catalog of Love, Death — and Justice

By William C. Lhotka, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Jan. 2–CLAYTON — Lots of people remember how Kenneth Baumruk fatally shot his wife and wounded two lawyers, a bailiff and a guard in the courthouse in Clayton before being hit by nine police bullets and surviving.

But how many would know about the St. Louis County sheriff who killed the assessor in what was the courthouse 100 years before?

Both incidents are described, along with less exciting lore, in a new local history book entitled “Mount Olive to Carondelet, 125 Years of Justice in the St. Louis County Circuit Court.”

The May 5, 1992, attack by Baumruk, an aerospace technician, is summarized under the heading “Baumruk: The Courthouse Changed Forever.”

The lesser known violence happened July 13, 1892, when Sheriff Emil Dosenbach fatally shot Assessor Scott Smith in the courthouse after a political quarrel over Republican congressional candidates, according to the book.

Unlike Baumruk, who was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, Dosenbach had claimed self-defense and got a lighter sentence from a jury in neighboring St. Charles County — six months in jail and a $500 fine.

The assessor’s widow later recovered $5,000, then the statutory maximum for wrongful death, from Dosenbach. The misdeed, however, did not end his political career. Dosenbach was later elected president of the Clayton School Board.

The vignettes are among hundreds in the 153-page book written by St. Louis County Law Library veteran librarians Bernard L. Lewandowski and Mary C. Dahm.

The Law Library, which is run by the county and located on the fifth floor of the courthouse, is open to the public. The librarians are county employees.

The librarians’ collaboration followed a suggestion from Judge David Lee Vincent III to write the book on the court’s first 125 years. Lewandowski and Joseph Fred Benson had put together a comparable volume about the first 100.

The authors scoured over minutes of meetings of the judges, culled information from archival collections, interviewed judges and reviewed old articles and stories of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Lewandowski said.

St. Louis city courts can trace their court ancestry to the days of the French and Spanish occupations and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Not so St. Louis County, which was part of the city until 1876, when voters approved their separation and gave birth to the county court system.

A courthouse was built and opened in 1878 in the heart of Clayton and remained until a new version opened in the 1960s.

Before that first courthouse, business was conducted in a former resort hotel known as the Mount Olive Courthouse. The Carondelet part of the book title comes from the street on which subsequent courthouses have stood.

The volume’s stories vary from brief profiles of judges who were appointed, retired and died, to court milestones like the creation of juvenile, family and municipal courts. And there are entertaining accounts of court scandals and landmark cases and the last county hanging.

The collection also contains about 16 pages of old photographs, including pictures from David Plengemeier, former owner of the Branding Iron, a popular longtime cafeteria, restaurant and bar across from the courthouse that closed in 1992.

Other photographs show campaign literature from the days before Missouri’s nonpartisan court plan ended election of urban judges.

Some of the entries are lighthearted. For example, Lewandowski and Dahm write about “March Madness in the Jury Box” in 1991. One juror’s thoughts turned to love, he called his fiancee, she came to the courthouse, they tied the knot and he returned to his jury duties in the court of Judge Steven H. Goldman after the noon lunch hour.

“During the same month,” the authors wrote, “another juror mysteriously disappeared from the Court during the course of a trial. When finally located, he explained that he had been depressed by the testimony, and it drove him to drink. The $700 fine and weekend in jail, which followed this revelation, probably did little to lift his spirits.”

The book is available for $10 at the Law Library. Or it can be purchased for $12.50 by mail, in care of the St. Louis County Law Library, 7900 Carondelet Avenue, Clayton, Mo. 63105.

blhotka@post-dispatch.com — 314-615-3283

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