A.O. Carpenter, editor of the Ukiah City Press, labored in his newspaper office early one Thursday morning in April, 1879. The screams of a woman on State Street roused him to his feet. Gazing out on the north-south thoroughfare, Carpenter recognized Mrs. Lazarus Landeker, the young mother of six and wife of the junior partner in the business of Marks & Landeker.
The editor stepped out into the brisk morning air, grabbed hold of Mrs. Landeker, trying to calm the woman. 'My husband, my husband, something's wrong with my husband,' or words to that effect, she wailed, for her words squealed in such frenzy as to be scarcely intelligible. She tugged and pulled Carpenter to the Marks Building in the first block south of Perkins St.
Just inside the front door of the store Carpenter found Lazarus Landeker, weltering in blood, on the floor. The body displayed a knife wound at the left temple and another ghastlier gash that had ripped through the victim's shirt and opened a lengthy stretch of flesh above the hip on the same side.
The killer was being restrained across the store. He being Elias Marks, a younger member of the managing family who founded the firm. He had been employed about the store for some years. Carpenter described him in the following day's paper as “a young man deficient in intellect and of ungovernable habits.”
The evening prior, Mr. Landeker had dismissed him from his position at the store, but Elias Marks, nevertheless, returned the following morning. Mr. Landeker ordered him to leave or he would summon the marshal to take charge of the matter.
Elias Marks claimed Landeker kicked him, but witnesses stated that Marks was all over the victim from the outset, even after Mr. Landeker fell to the floor with hands and legs upraised.
Apparently, Lazarus Landeker had left the breakfast table at home with his wife and children not fifteen minutes before his fatal encounter at the front of the store. The suddenness of the crime shocked the town. This was only the second recorded murder within the city limits of Mendocino County's seat of government.
For reasons known to 19th century thinking, the Healdsburg Enterprise made a note of stating, “Landeker was a Jew, and Marks, also, is a Jew.”
A.O. Carpenter of the Ukiah City Press did not print this detail. Regardless of background, Elias Marks confessed to the obvious. In the Mendocino County jail, he almost immediately refused to take food. His hunger strike lasted a full week before he took up nourishment again.
At trial, a jury convicted him of second degree murder and the judge sentenced him to San Quentin. He spent a relatively short time in the Marin County prison before he was transferred to the state facility at Folsom. On April 12, 1883, he was pardoned under condition that he leave the country. Within a matter of days officials deemed the pardon invalidated and Elias Marks, once again, took up residence at Folsom Prison. He gained a full pardon precisely four years later. From that point on his whereabouts became a mystery.
In a varied life that traversed the United States from boyhood on the east coast to fighting alongside the staunchest of abolitionists, John Brown, in Kansas during the 1850s, Aurelius O. Carpenter and his wife Helen McCowen Carpenter eventually made their way to California and Mendocino County. Though he didn't have to deal with any crimes as heinous as the Landeker murder, Carpenter had already served as Ukiah's first official city marshal prior to the aforesaid killing. His life story, not to mention those of his wife and children could fill volumes. Just one example is the treasure of first hand day-to-day, detailed history that can be found in the diary that newlywed Helen McCowen Carpenter kept of her extended family's travels from Kansas to California just before the Civil War.
The Landeker murder did not cast lasting aspersions on the family business. His uncle Henry and brother, Abe Marks, continued in mercantile and clothing stores for decades to come. Abe Marks owned stores in Ukiah well into the twentieth century, entered his horses in Sonoma County races, and later in life successfully moved his business enterprise to Taft, California.
The early spring murder of Mr. Landeker proved a portent of a bloody and notorious year in Mendocino County history. Some of those events, such as the lynching of three young men in Willits have already been recounted within the pages of the AVA, others, like the desperadoes who planned to steal the county's tax money from the sheriff will take further pages to give justice to.
(Good and bad marks at malcolmmacdonaldoutlawford.com.)
I like these histories Malcom writes. Well done and interesting. I have a Carpenter in my family history associated with the abolitionists movement in Kansas as well, Abigail Carpenter Norton. That Carpenter family has roots that go back to William Bradford of the Mayflower.