An Akron congregation lost its innocence 75 years ago when a young woman disappeared on Easter weekend.
Shy, quiet Ruth Zwicker, 23, mysteriously vanished April 12, 1941, after going to North Hill Methodist Church on Blaine Avenue to practice piano at 10:30 a.m. on Holy Saturday. Zwicker was a graduate of Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and worked as a substitute music teacher in Akron Public Schools.
When she failed to return to her Wall Street home to take her mother shopping as planned, parents Arthur and Marion Zwicker grew concerned.
The Zwickers found their daughter’s car at the church, but a janitor told them no one was inside.
Easter Sunday arrived without any news of Ruth. The family called Akron officers, who transmitted the girl’s description — dark hair, dark eyes, 5 feet 5½ inches, black-and-red pleated skirt, tan sweater, tan shoes — to police stations across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.
“Brown-eyed Ruth Zwicker was still missing today and in a comfortable North Hill home her mother, her father and her pretty sisters kept a frightened vigil, hoping desperately as the hours wore on that some trace of the attractive young musician might be found,” the Beacon Journal reported April 15.
Volunteers from the 2,000-member congregation scoured the neighborhood. Boy Scouts from Troop 62 searched Gorge Metro Park. Police wondered if the woman had eloped with a boyfriend, but the family doubted it.
“Ruth always said she had no time for boys,” Marion Zwicker explained. “She was serious-minded, and music was her chief interest in life.”
Arthur Zwicker returned to the church.
“The janitor took me around the other night and opened things and showed me all the rooms,” he said. “But I had a feeling there were places left uninvestigated.”
On Thursday, April 17, an anonymous woman called Akron police with a tip. “Check the janitor,” she told an officer before sobbing and hanging up.
Albert B. Lukens, 58, who lived next to the church, welcomed investigators the next day.
After quizzing the janitor, Detectives I.J. Davis and Harry Kimerer had a bad feeling. They went to the basement, looked at the boiler furnace and began to sift ashes.
“I don’t know what you’re hunting for, but that sifting won’t do you any good,” Lukens said.
As the detectives dug deeper, their worst fears were realized. They found bone fragments, two teeth and parts of a zipper.
Ruth Zwicker never left church: She had been cremated in the furnace.
The shocking crime made national news.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Lukens confessed to police. “I saw her in the primary Sunday school room and I walked up to her and asked her for a kiss. She got up off the piano bench and slapped my face.
“I grabbed her arm and she broke away and then came at me again, scratching and hitting at me. … I gave her a shove … and she went backwards over the piano bench and her head hit the pedestal of the piano leg. I think it broke her neck.”
During interrogation, he admitted strangling Zwicker, dragging her to the basement and hiding her body in a coal pile overnight. The following morning, Easter, he returned to the church, stuffed the body into the furnace, shut the iron door and went about his chores as the congregation arrived for a service.
The slaying devastated the Zwickers, but they took comfort in faith.
“At first I wanted to go right out and kill the man who did that to my daughter, but now I feel that Ruth is with God and we know she is directing our thoughts today,” Marion Zwicker said.
“One thing that Ruth said two weeks before her death is going through my mind. She said, ‘You know, Mother, I am not afraid of death.’ One of her favorite verses in the Bible was ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil.”
The Rev. J.H. Sivard, pastor of the church, led the stunned congregation in a prayer of forgiveness for the janitor: “And for him whose hand cast the shadow and wrought this tragedy, we commit him into the assurance of thy forgiving love, knowing that ‘all we, like sheep, have gone astray.’ ”
Lukens was married and had three grown children, but officers learned he had a troubling past.
As a 15-year-old in Cincinnati in 1899, he beat a woman, 38, to death with a fireplace poker to steal $71 from her purse. He served seven years in prison for manslaughter before being paroled.
He moved to Canton and was a suspect in the 1908 beating death of a 22-year-old woman, but he never was indicted.
Lukens moved to Akron about 1913 and worked at Goodrich, Goodyear, Miller, City Hospital and finally North Hill Methodist Church, where he started in January 1940.
Lukens’ neighbor Doris Shaw was the mystery woman who tipped off police, explaining that the janitor had once accosted her, demanding a kiss and ripping her blouse before she fought him off. When she heard a woman was missing, she guessed the horrible truth.
The murder trial began Sept. 8, 1941, before Summit County Common Pleas Judge Walter B. Wanamaker. County Prosecutor Alva J. Russell told the nine-man, three-woman jury that Lukens was a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde killer” who deserved the electric chair.
“Are you going to turn this man loose to roam the streets to attack and murder other innocent girls, or are you going to give him the fate he deserves?” he asked.
Defense lawyer E. Guy Hammond argued that Zwicker’s death was accidental and that Lukens’ confession was coerced when police beat him up.
“There has been no evidence to prove that Mr. Lukens killed this girl,” he said in court. “Nothing but conjecture, supposition and surmise.”
Besides, he said, “it still is not murder to burn, or cremate, a dead body.”
After deliberating for two days, jurors convicted Lukens but recommended mercy. The crowd gasped as Lukens was sentenced to life in prison.
“The chair would have been too easy for him, I believe,” mother Marion Zwicker said after the trial. “I want him to have endless torture in his soul — the kind of torture only a life prisoner must feel.”
Lukens died at the Ohio Penitentiary of a heart condition in 1956 at age 73. He is buried in a penal cemetery in Columbus.
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of Lost Akron from The History Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.