George Dewalt Saxton

Brother to the first lady Ida McKinley. George Saxton was murdered in Canton, Ohio, on October 7, 1898, He was approaching the home of his lover, the widowed Eva Althouse, when his former love, Anna George, shot him.

Unmarried.

From first Ladies Museum http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=25

During his sister's tenure as First Lady, George Saxton was murdered in Canton, Ohio, on 7 October 1898, a short distance from the Saxton House where he lived with his sister Mary Barber and her family. He had left the Saxton House and was approaching the home of his lover, the widowed Eva Althouse, when he was shot. The assailant was widely believed to be his former married lover Anna George, who was nevertheless found innocent of murder charges during a trial which garnered national headlines. From first Ladies Museum It was around 6:00 p.m. on October 7, 1898, that the Canton police station received a telephone call reporting the murder. George Saxton had been shot dead on the sidewalk outside the residence of Eva Althouse, a widow of doubtful reputation, at No. 319 Lincoln Avenue. His face "was upturned, his right arm was lying over his face as if to guard it from assault and his left arm was under his body." Three bullets were found in his body; one that passed through his abdominal cavity had been the immediate cause of death. Among the large crowd the police found assembled at the scene, there were witnesses who asserted that the shooting had been done by a woman dressed in black. The woman had fired two shots and then walked away about fifty feet. When her victim cried feebly for help, she stopped and turned back; she fired two more shots and then disappeared in the darkness. The police had heard enough to identify their prime suspect; they proceeded at once to arrest Annie E. George, a jilted mistress who had made countless public threats against Saxton's life.

The love (and hate) story of George Saxton and Annie George went back to the previous decade. The handsome, impeccably dressed George Saxton, born in 1848, was the only son of one of Canton's leading families; his father James was a banker and founder of the Canton Repository, and Ida, one of George's two sisters, was married to William McKinley. Saxton's prime interests seemed to be the pursuit of women (generally from a humbler social background) and, to a lesser degree, driving fast horses and bicycle riding. Annie George, born Annie Ehrhart in Hanoverton (Columbiana County) in 1858, married at age 20 a carpenter named Sample C. George. In 1883 the Georges moved with their two sons to Canton where Annie soon had the misfortune of attracting Saxton's admiring gaze. Sometime after her arrival in the city, Saxton came upon her while she was shopping at the Goldberg Bros. store in the Saxton Block, a large residential-commercial building that he owned and managed. Losing no time, he asked one of the clerks who she was. When he was informed of her name, he commented: "She is a remarkably handsome woman. I will make her acquaintance." He was good to his word, and the rest is crime history.

Saxton arranged to be introduced to Mrs. George before she left the store and he promptly offered to rent her family a suite of rooms in the Saxton Block. Soon after the new tenants moved in, Saxton made frequent calls to see how they were getting on. On one of his visits he suggested in a joking manner that Mrs. George, who was a seamstress, mend a pair of his gloves. When her work was finished, he was delighted with her skill and went on to request that she try on and alter a sealskin jacket (sacque) intended for a friend who was about her size and build. It must have been a size and build he liked, because when the alterations were made and Annie modeled the garment for him, Saxton said that the fit was so perfect it would be a shame to take it from her; he offered it to the pretty seamstress as a gift. The present of the sealskin jacket capped the first phase of Saxton's amorous campaign, and in due course (the timing is uncertain) their romance began in earnest.

For a long time the lovers met undisturbed, for Sample George seems to have been a patient man. But in February 1892, after an unsuccessful interview in which he had begged his landlord to discontinue his visits to Annie, he brought a $20,000 suit against Saxton for alienation of affections. Withdrawn but then reinstituted, the case got better and better for after the original filing Saxton persuaded Annie to obtain a divorce in South Dakota so that they would be free to marry. When she returned home, though, she found that her lover's ardor had cooled. Following her former husband's example, she plunged into a thicket of litigation with Saxton. She began the warfare with a $30,000 breach of promise suit and a replevin action to recover household goods she claimed he refused to allow her to remove from the Saxton Block. He countered with proceedings to restrain her from disturbing his peace and business relations and obtained an order enjoining her from visiting his building and especially his rooms, where his favorite activities, as she well knew, made privacy an absolute necessity.

While the litigation dragged on, Annie George's sense of frustration was heightened by the common report that fickle George Saxton had now centered his attentions on a good-looking widow, Eva D. Althouse. This was not the first time Mrs. Althouse had figured in town gossip. She had divorced her first spouse and married Mr. Althouse when he was discovered by detectives cowering in her bathroom dressed, to quote the guarded language of a contemporary account, "in very scant attire so far as clothing was concerned."

Annie George did not keep to herself her irritation over this new liaison. All over Canton she threatened Saxton's life, vowing, among other colorful outbursts, that she would shoot him so full of lead that he would stand stiff. One evening when Saxton and Eva Althouse were bicycling near her home, Mrs. George confronted them "wild with rage." She drew a revolver and pointing it at Saxton forced him to accompany her home; on the way she threatened to kill him if he did not keep his frequent promises to marry her when her husband's breach of promise suit was settled. Saxton was able to calm her down, but Mrs. Althouse, who was unaccustomed to Annie's violence, promptly appeared before a magistrate to seek an order placing her rival under a bond to keep the peace.

Then strangely the turmoil ceased. Shaken by the news that Annie had approached Sample George's lawyers with an offer to testify in his case, Saxton patched up his quarrels with the woman he had wronged. After he and Annie took a sentimental journey together to Pittsburgh, the litigation between them was settled, and he renewed his promise to marry her when her husband's action terminated. But he was only playing for time; when Mr. George settled for $1,800, Saxton kept Annie at bay and, what was worse, pursued his assiduous wooing of the charming Mrs. Althouse. This new treachery threw Annie George into a frenzy of activity. On Thursday, October 6, the day before the murder, Mayor Rice of Canton deputed Patrolman Dickerhoof to accompany Mrs. George in a visit she planned to pay her faithless lover at his rooms in the Saxton Block; she was afraid to go alone, she had said, and wanted protection. She and the policeman waited together in the street watching Saxton's dark window, but when a light at last went on, Annie seemed to lose her nerve and asked Dickerhoof to meet her there again the following evening. At 5:30 p.m. on the next day she called on Judge McCarty to ask if she could ignore his injunction barring her from visiting Saxton. The judge told her that the order was still in effect. She kept Dickerhoof waiting in vain for her at the Block that evening, but of course the light did not go on again in Saxton's room. He lay dead at the threshold of Eva Althouse's home.

When police arrested Annie George at her residence on the night of the murder, she remained resolutely silent, but her dress and hand told secrets of their own. Burrs and "Spanish needles" that clung to her skirt resembled those that grew in abundance in a vacant lot near the Althouse home. At the police station Dr. Maria Pontius, called to search the suspect, found that the thumb and forefinger of her right hand was discolored with something that looked like burnt gunpowder. After this matter was scraped off, a number of police officers smelled the substance and agreed that it was gunpowder. (Later Annie's counsel was to refer to them contemptuously as a "smelling committee.")

References

• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12246808/george-dewalt-saxton
• https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/4:1:LZZ1-XTH