Chicago One-Legged Killer Clown

In 1912, itinerant circus performer Charles Cramer, who used the stage name Conway and walked on a wooden leg, moved into a Chicago rooming house with his wife and a vacationing couple that included a wealthy heiress. The heiress soon turned up strangled in one of the rooms, and Cramer and his wife vanished, triggering a nationwide manhunt that focused on the easily recognized one-legged clown.

Authorities eventually captured Cramer and convicted him of first-degree murder, and a court sentenced him to life in Joliet prison instead of sending him to the gallows. In 1925 he escaped from prison and disappeared, and despite the publicity around the case, no one ever proved where the one-legged killer clown went or how his life ended.

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