One man was missing and presumed dead. His friend was also missing, whereabouts unknown. When the friend was finally found, his story riveted Depression-era Louisville for months. But today it’s long forgotten. It’s not mentioned in any history of Louisville. It’s as if it never happened. That may be in part because we don’t really know what happened. We will probably never know.
On the evening of Monday, February 17, 1936, William Detchen, 23, a drugstore clerk, disappeared from work, and was never seen again. Within a few days, his employer, a gay man, pharmacist George B. Aufenkamp, 32, also vanished. Two weeks later, he was arrested in Miami, Florida, brought back to Louisville, and charged with murder. The charges didn’t stick because no body was found. Because homosexuality was considered a mental illness at the time, Aufenkamp was institutionalized at Central State Hospital. He was discharged twelve years later and died in 1959.
That’s all we know for sure. The rest is what most courts consider hearsay. We only had a single source to rely on, Aufenkamp himself, but his story kept changing. The Courier-Journal did an admirable job of reporting, but errors crept in. We may only know part of the story, and that’s all we can know. Everyone involved is dead.
That Monday was sufficiently unexciting. At about 6 a.m., William Detchen left the residence of his friend Florence White on Third near Main to go to work. He was driving an automobile owned by his employer, druggist George B. Aufenkamp, Jr. Detchen was a clerk at Aufenkamp’s new store on the northwest corner of Market and Campbell (the building’s still there). He told White he’d be back by 11 a.m. He always kept his word.
Around 7:45 a.m., R. H. Young, who lived with his wife and son in an apartment above the store, heard moans and groans from the rear room below. Shortly after that, he heard Aufenkamp walk in and say, “Bill, Bill, what is the matter?” Detchen, who sounded like he was in great pain, mumbled something. Aufenkamp went to the front, locked the door, and turned off the lights. A bit later, the moans stopped. Someone came to the front door but couldn’t get in. Aufenkamp shouted, “We’re closed up,” and they left.
Aufenkamp’s father, George B., Sr., showed up a bit after that. He later claimed he saw Detchen leave the store at about 8:30 a.m. That might be true, but he wasn’t alive. Over the next few days, some friends spotted Aufenkamp downtown, but police couldn’t find him. Then, he too disappeared.
The dapper Aufenkamp was the scion of a prosperous local grocer. A self-privileged brat who played fast and loose with the law, he had a nasty temper. In 1928, he’d been arrested in New York City for robbery and assault. Three years later he pled guilty to selling mortgaged jewelry. By 1935, he was advertising himself as a pharmacist, and even opened his own store, but he didn’t have a license. Even so, somehow he managed to buy a lot of pharmaceuticals legally. The industry was rather lax.
Aufenkamp’s family knew their son was two-sided. He was perhaps bipolar. His father said he never thought his namesake would harm anyone, but he could sometimes work up a rage. His son had cost him thousands of dollars over the years.
Little is known of the handsome Detchen beyond his height, and a small photo published in the Courier-Journal. It’s not even certain he was gay. He may have been bisexual. He and Aufenkamp probably met sometime in 1935, and had a whirlwind romance. That summer they spent some time together at a tourist cabin on River Road. But by the time of his disappearance, the affair had cooled. Detchen confided in one friend that he’d become scared of Aufenkamp. And he wanted to get married: to a woman.
Over the next several days, police scoured the city looking for both men. Unable to get into the drugstore, they busted down the door, and searched the premises. They even pumped an outhouse in the back (numerous properties in Louisville still had them). But, by then, Aufenkamp was hundreds of miles away. He’d jumped on a bus to Atlanta, then hitchhiked to Miami, where he found work at another drugstore.
In a coincidence that not even the talkies could make believable, a woman from Louisville was vacationing there when she spotted him. She’d been carrying around news clippings about the case. She showed them to Miami police and they arrested him. When Louisville police were alerted, they boarded a train to pick him up. It took them three days to get there.
Aufenkamp changed his story several times before finally coming up with the one that seems most plausible. Even so, there’s some doubt.
According to Aufenkamp, Detchen had been suffering from a severe cold and was taking medicine for it. When he came to the pharmacy that evening, he decided to lay down in the back. The building had a rat problem, so Aufenkamp had purchased potassium cyanide from a downtown store, and brought it back to be mixed with sugar and sprinkled on bread. He carelessly left it on the prescription counter with an ear medicine.
Aufenkamp had taught Detchen how to make capsules in case of an emergency if he wasn’t there: probably another illegality. Detchen wasn’t a registered pharmacist. He said Detchen mistakenly poured the cyanide into a capsule while Aufenkamp was up front, swallowed it, and laid down. Later, Aufenkamp realized what had happened but it was too late. Detchen died soon after. Aufenkamp panicked.
He later claimed he’d found a “bum” and paid him $10 to get rid of the body. He said the man took and dumped Detchen in the Ohio River. But that wasn’t true. Aufenkamp disposed of the body himself, probably with a little assistance from his father.
Late that night, Aufenkamp (and his father?) stuffed Detchen’s body into the back seat of his blue sedan and took off. Puttering down Dixie Highway, which was then just a two-lane country road, he got to the banks of the Salt River near West Point and dumped the body from a bridge into the icy waters, then took off for Miami.
After he was back in Louisville, police scoured the banks of the Salt River looking for the body. A double-breasted gray coat showed up, but Detchen’s father couldn’t identify it. At one point Aufenkamp himself was taken to the Salt River bridge to point out where he’d thrown the body. It was never found.
Aufenkamp’s scandalous case dragged on in the courts and the papers the whole summer of 1936. He faced three charges: murder, obstruction of justice, and forgery. In June two psychiatrists concluded he was legally sane but “abnormal and dangerous.” But the only evidence of Detchen’s death was Aufenkamp’s own words. The court was forced to drop the murder charge but decided to pursue a charge of lunacy instead.
At the time, “homosexual insanity” was considered a genuine condition. Around the same time of Aufenkamp’s arrest, a doctor in Lexington was imprisoned for it. Psychiatrists of the day presumed that homosexuality was a mental illness because of the number of gay men who came to them for help. But, as Evelyn Hooker pointed out two decades later, if a homosexual was mentally stable, and leading a regular life, he wasn’t likely to consult a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists were ignoring a huge section of the homosexual population.
The case against Aufenkamp came to an end on October 7, 1936. Two psychiatrists told the court he suffered from an abnormal and diseased mind and that he’d stop at nothing to satisfy his perverted desires. A criminal court jury committed him to Central State Hospital for the remainder of his life.
Twelve years later, in late 1948, Aufenkamp, now 44, appealed for release. By then doctors had certified he was no longer insane. Prosecutors still wanted to try him for murder but, without a body, there was nothing they could do. On December 10, he was freed and he returned to Louisville.
There his story might have ended, but Aufenkamp was nothing if not sexually robust. On July 10, 1951, he and another man were arrested at a downtown hotel. Detectives had followed them and heard Aufenkamp make an immoral proposal to the other man. He was sentenced to fifty days in jail and fined $100. Soon after he was arrested again on a loitering charge after he was seen talking to a soldier in the doorway of his father’s house on Sixth near Oak while clad only in satin shorts. In October a judge promised to drop all charges provided he left town. He moved to New York City.
In late 1959, Aufenkamp fell ill and returned to Louisville. He died on November 27 and is buried with his parents in Calvary Cemetery.
There remains some doubt about Aufenkamp’s story. He had a manic temper. Detchen wanted out of the relationship. Enraged, did Aufenkamp give him a tainted capsule and tell him to take a nap?
It seems odd Detchen wouldn’t have noticed a bottle labeled cyanide, and known not to fill a capsule with it. Aufenkamp’s father didn’t think his son was capable of killing, but parental love is sometimes blind. Murder isn’t out of the question, but without a skeleton to examine, Detchen’s death will remain a mystery.
David Williams is the founder of the Williams-Nichols Collection, one of the largest LGBTQ archives and libraries in the country. It’s housed at the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville. His full report on this case is available for perusal there.
“After he was back in Louisville, police scoured the banks of the Salt River looking for the body. A double-breasted gray coat showed up, but Detchen’s father couldn’t identify it. At one point Aufenkamp himself was taken to the Salt River bridge to point out where he’d thrown the body. It was never found.”
This article appears in Jun 5-18, 2024.