by Steve Lehto
The Kreischer Mansion looked like it had been built to order for a horror movie. It was surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence, and the highlight of its façade was a turret. It was painted an odd combination of dark orange and green with maroon accents. Visitors to the house over the years had claimed it was haunted. Now, the only resident of the house was Young, an ex-Marine who had been hired as caretaker of the property and lived upstairs in the old place. We do not know what McKelvey was told to get him to the Kreischer Mansion. Perhaps Young just said they needed to talk. Or maybe he said he had a business proposition to discuss.
During the visit on March 29, 2005, according to prosecutors, Young attacked McKelvey and tried strangling him. McKelvey got away from Young and tried fleeing. Young chased after him and the two struggled. McKelvey put up a fight, so Young pulled a knife and stabbed him repeatedly. To make sure McKelvey was dead, Young dragged his body over to a pond on the property and held his head under water. He then hauled McKelvey’s body into the mansion, called some of his business associates, and asked for help in disposing of the body.
Shortly after Young made the call, four other men arrived. They used hacksaws to chop up McKelvey’s body and threw it into the old home’s furnace. They cleaned up after themselves and went on with their lives. Not long after, the furnace was replaced, guaranteeing that the crime would be almost impossible to solve. McKelvey’s sister filed a missing-person report, but the police had no leads and no idea where to begin looking. Considering the company McKelvey kept, the police weren’t exactly inspired to go out and do a whole lot of looking without more to go on. It would take a police informant’s tip to let the police know of McKelvey’s grisly end.
The police would eventually arrest Young and four of his associates and charge them with the murder of McKelvey. The prosecution would later theorize that Young had been paid $8,000 to carry out the hit on McKelvey, which had been ordered because McKelvey had upset other members of the organization. The story had unraveled when one of the men who had helped chop up the body decided to tell the police what he knew and agreed to testify.
In 2008 Young was convicted of the murder along with a few other crimes—arson, armed robbery, gun smuggling—and sentenced to life in prison. News reports of the crime and the trial almost always highlighted the Kreischer Mansion, the setting of the murder. Despite its spooky exterior and the infamous murder that had taken place, the home had a remarkable history long before anyone was murdered there.
The Kreischer Mansion was built in 1885 and is Victorian in style. It is about 6,700 square feet and is one of several mansions built by a wealthy family that had made its money with a brick business. Balthasar Kreischer came to America from Bavaria, and in 1855 he established the Kreischer Brickworks. His business would flourish as he supplied bricks, made from clay located on Staten Island, to a booming building trade in New York City and the East Coast. He built housing for his workers and soon oversaw the factory town of Kreischerville. As his empire grew, so did his family. He built a mansion for himself and then a pair of mansions, one each for his two oldest sons, George and Edward. The company became B. Kreischer & Sons Fire Brick Manufactory. A certain amount of bad luck followed the family. Twice, the family’s brick factory burned to the ground. The employees, however, were said to have fond feelings toward the family. On one occasion, the Kreischers furnished their employees—out of work while the factory was being rebuilt—with thousands of dollars of relief despite having no legal obligation to do so.
Shortly after the homes for his sons were finished, Balthasar died. Although the brick business continued after their father’s death, it was never as successful as when their father was alive. In 1895, Edward Kreischer committed suicide. No one knew why. The New York Times reported that he had been in good spirits shortly before he was found with a single bullet wound to his head and a gun lying next to his body, not far from the factory. Some people speculated that it was work related because his family life seemed fine.
One of the two mansions also burned down in the early twentieth century. The brick business ran until 1927. During World War I, at a time of anti-German sentiment, the name Kreischerville raised eyebrows. The locals began calling the town Charleston, perhaps after Charles Kreischer, Balthasar’s son, who, despite his German last name, was still well liked in the community.
The remaining home, now simply called the Kreischer Mansion, has fourteen rooms—including five bedrooms and five baths—and was briefly used as a restaurant. It sits on a hill with a full acre of property in the area known as the Charleston neighborhood of Staten Island. Its address is on Arthur Kill Road—for the curious, “Kill” in this context is the Dutch word for “creek”—at the juncture with Kreischer Street. Stories abound on the Internet that the home is haunted. Among the spectral occupants is said to be the wife of Edward, the son who had killed himself. Some say she can be heard crying in the mansion, although this would seem a bit odd. She and her husband had lived in the other mansion, which is no longer standing.
It has been a while since the home was occupied as a residence. In 1996, it was converted into a restaurant. After the restaurant failed, the mansion was bought by Isaac Yomtovian, the man who hired Young as a caretaker while the home was being refurbished. Yomtovian paid $1,400,000 for the property in 2000 and invested another million dollars restoring the property in the next few years. When he bought it, the mansion’s roof was caving in and everything down to and including the foundation needed work. Yomtovian tried to turn the property into an “active-adult community,” but he couldn’t secure financing for the project. At that point, Yomtovian decided to place the Kreischer Mansion on the market. The property now included five acres of surrounding land, and the initial asking price was $11.6 million. When he listed it for sale, he asked $1.6 million for the Kreischer Mansion and another $10 million for the surrounding acreage. The mansion itself had been listed previously for $2,499,000, which was then reduced to $1,599,000, but Yomtovian found no buyers. The real estate professionals suggested it would make a good spa or bed and breakfast. The surrounding property will almost certainly be developed. It is just a question of whether the Kreischer Mansion will be saved and to what use it will be put.
Yomtovian did tell a newspaper reporter that he had written a movie treatment about the mansion that, if made, would leave audiences spellbound. He also allowed producers of the show Boardwalk Empire to use the property in filming their pilot in 2009.
*William K. Rashbaum, “Grisly Mob Killing at S.I. Mansion Is Detailed,” New York Times, May 12, 2006.
*“Conviction in Mob Murder at Staten Island’s Kreischer Mansion,” Staten Island (NY) Advance, October 27, 2008.
The Murder House Where No One Was Murdered
THE GARDETTE-LAPRETE HOUSE
716 Dauphine Street
New Orleans, Louisiana 70116
In 1792, a mysterious stranger sailed into New Orleans and boldly asked to rent the most expensive home in the city. Money was no object and he—along with a large retinue—was soon ensconced in the Gardette-LaPrete House on Dauphine Street in the French Quarter. The stranger came from the Far East and was rumored to be a Turkish sultan—or the brother of the sultan—but few details emerged as to his identity. No one knew his name, and few cared. He was rich and spent his unending supply of money lavishly. Once the lease was signed, he moved into the huge home with his entourage, which included a harem, servants, eunuchs, and an abundance of opulent furniture, artwork, and other treasures befitting royalty. After moving in, the sultan beefed up security on the house, placing bars over the windows. Members of the sultan’s staff patrolled outside the home. Some people began referring to the home as “The Sultan’s Palace.”
Then the sultan began throwing wild parties. At least, that was what it sounded like. He didn’t invite his neighbors; he had more than enough people in his entourage to entertain without bringing strangers into the home. Loud music coming from the house could be heard
on the street, and people walking by could smell exotic incense in the air.
One night the hard-partying sultan appeared to be outdoing his previous festivities. Neighbors were said to recall having heard yelling and screaming from the mansion but had thought little of it. By this time, they had gotten used to their boisterous neighbors from the Orient. The next morning, all was quiet on Dauphine Street. Even the guards were gone from in front of the house. Some curious neighbors investigated and found the front gate unlocked. Then they noticed what looked like blood seeping from under the front door. Some said the blood flowing under the front door was so copious, it had been spotted by a neighbor from across the street.
The police were summoned and the front door was quickly forced open, revealing a gruesome scene. It appeared that the inhabitants of the home had all been brutally murdered. Eunuchs, servant girls, and the rest of the sultan’s entourage were all hacked to death, scattered about the huge mansion. Blood was everywhere, the home had been ransacked, and valuable artwork had vanished. The sultan was also missing. Had he fled? Investigators tried to make sense of the scene when one of them noticed a man’s hand reaching up from the soil in the courtyard. It was the sultan’s; he had been buried alive.
Various theories were floated as to who had committed the brutal mass murder. A pirate ship was said to have been docked in the harbor around the time. Might the stories of the sultan’s opulent lifestyle have reached the ears of men who would come to steal his treasure? Some wondered if the sultan was really a sultan after all. If he had been the brother of the sultan, perhaps his brother—the real sultan—had been angered by his brother and had sent assassins to kill him. Perhaps he had stolen the treasures—and the women—he had brought to New Orleans. Had his brother learned the whereabouts of the missing loot—and the missing women—and sought revenge and the recovery of the wealth? The crime was never solved.
The story of the Sultan’s Palace is well known in New Orleans, and the home—which still stands—is one of the city’s most infamous landmarks. What is commonly known as the Gardette-LaPrete House is within just a few blocks of the LaLaurie mansion and is also in the French Quarter. Anyone doing even the slightest amount of research on this story will immediately spot problems with it. The Gardette-LaPrete house was built in 1836 and named for its first two owners: the man who built it and the man who bought the Greek Revival home from him in 1839. The story of the house—and the murders said to have occurred there—is long and winding. Among other things, the second owner’s name was Lepretre—one word—and no one was ever murdered in the house. Notwithstanding the facts, it is widely said that the “LaPrete” house was the site of a fantastical murder. That story has morphed through the years, to the point where it is highly unlikely that it will ever be extinguished.
The truth is not as spectacular as the story of the Sultan’s Palace. In the late 1830s, Joseph Coulon Gardette built a three-and-a-half-story house on a piece of property he bought for four thousand piastres, an archaic unit of currency that probably corresponded with the equivalent of Spanish dollars, sometimes known as “pieces of eight.” The stuccoed brick building was said to be the first home in New Orleans to have a basement. It fronted on Dauphine at the corner of Orleans and was quite large. Its front to Dauphine was almost 80 feet long, while another side stretched 33 feet on Orleans. The lot comprised 2,508 square feet. Because legal documents were filed with the local government—and survive to this day—we know details about the home’s construction we might not know otherwise about so old a structure. The plans for the home were contained in the legal filings before construction began.
The plinths of the ground floor and of the first story shall be panelled, the door and the window casing pilastered [sic], the doors with panels and movable blinds, the floors shall be made with planks six to seven inches wide and one and one-quarter inch in thickness, the stairs shall have a mahogany handrail and mahogany balusters.
The entire construction project was slated to cost 14,500 piastres.
One of the most obvious features of the house is cast-iron work on the second-and third-floor balconies, which is often associated with the older homes in the French Quarter. It appears that this ironwork was added later. Architectural historians note that the ironwork on the balconies was not mentioned in the building plans, despite the high level of detail in the plans otherwise.
Gardette sold the home only a few years later to Jean Baptiste Lepretre, a wealthy man who lived on a plantation and intended the mansion to be a second home. Over the years, Lepretre’s name would commonly be rendered as Le Prete or LaPrete. The selling price in 1839 was reportedly a little over $20,000. In later years, Lepretre would rent the house to others. Some said he had fallen on hard times, but others claimed that he simply had not been using the home enough to justify letting it sit vacant. Despite how much we know about the house’s history and construction, almost nothing is certain about the murders that were said to have taken place there. How many people died? What were their names? Facts like these are hard to come by, and there are several variations on the story.
Researchers trying to learn more—such as the date of the crime or the names of the victims—encounter a huge gap in the evidence. There is no record of these events in local newspapers. Some modern writers suggest that the local authorities destroyed the records of the event, like the police reports, but how would they keep such a story out of the newspapers?
Deconstructing legends and myths can be difficult, particularly when they are not based on actual events. And the murders at the Gardette-LaPrete house never happened. This story appears to have started with a book published in 1922 called Legends of Louisiana, written by Helen Pitkin Schertz. The story originated from a chapter in the book titled “The Brother of the Sultan.” There, Schertz wrote that a man arrived by ship in New Orleans, claiming to be the brother of the sultan of Turkey. According to Schertz, this story took place in 1792, when Louisiana was still technically under Spanish rule. The most obvious problem with Schertz’s story is that it took place long before the Lepretre house had been built.
According to Schertz, when the sultan’s ship first docked at New Orleans, the ship’s captain negotiated with the harbormaster, asking that the locals provide a suitable home for someone as important and rich as the brother of a sultan. The harbormaster immediately realized that the only house in town that would meet the needs of so important a person was the home of Lepretre. Negotiations ensued and soon the sultan’s brother was living in the home with his servants, eunuchs, and beautiful young “desert-girls.” Some time passed, with the sultan’s brother and his entourage amusing the locals with their strange customs and immense wealth. They kept to themselves and threw parties that could be heard on the streets by passersby, some of whom wandered by the house hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious tenants.
Then, one day, it all came to a bizarre end. No one stirred inside the house and deliverymen were unable to get answers at the door. After the better part of a day without getting anyone to answer at the door or any of the gates, someone decided it was necessary to force the door open. Inside, they found the sultan’s brother with his throat slashed. At his feet were his five “child-women,” likewise murdered. Authorities were summoned and someone decided to run down to the docks to see if anyone on the sultan’s brother’s ship might be able to provide some clues. The ship was gone. According to the story, the sultan’s ship had been there the whole time but had now, overnight, simply vanished without notifying the harbormaster.
Schertz’s story—and it is written in such a fashion that it can only be taken as fiction—then explains how various stories were floated to explain the bizarre events that took place in the Lepretre home. Also, the ship that had brought the sultan’s brother had now become a pirate’s ship, marauding on the high seas, while the Lepretre mansion was now haunted.
The Lepretre mansion would not be built until 1836. And there is no question that Schertz was describ
ing the Lepretre mansion in her story. Her book contained only two stories, and the page before the chapter “The Sultan’s Brother” contains a large photograph titled “The House of Tragic Mystery.” It is a photo of the Lepretre mansion, and it is the only illustration in the entire book.
Some might wonder if it is possible that this story took place in a home on the same site, perhaps one that was displaced by the Lepretre mansion. This seems highly unlikely; the purchase price paid by Gardette for the lot would seem to be too small for the previous house on the site to be a mansion. And the property was owned by someone named Celestin Jung prior to July 25, 1836; Schertz does not mention this person.
Schertz’s story also included Lepretre himself. How old would he have been if he had been present to negotiate with the sultan’s brother in 1792? We know that Lepretre lost the house in a sheriff’s sale in 1878. That means Lepretre was alive eighty-six years after Scherzer’s story was said to have taken place. Unless Lepretre was no older than fourteen when he rented the house to the sultan’s brother, he would have been over a hundred years old when he lost the home at the sheriff’s auction.
Searches of old newspapers also do not reveal any murders taking place in the Lepretre mansion, nor any tales of a prince from a far-off land causing a commotion when he appeared at dockside with a heavily laden treasure ship and a bevy of harem “girls.” It seems that the stories started, at least in print, with Schertz’s book in 1922 and just grew from there. Some of the tellings “corrected” the errors in her story and placed the events at the house during a time frame when the house existed. Many stories added details, of the sort more often found in ghost stories told around a campfire. This Old House repeated the myth that the murders were discovered when passersby saw blood flowing from under the front door, a fact that was not part of Schertz’s version.