Frederick Thomas Price born May 10, 1879 in Neenah, Wisconsin. The family lived on Center Street and his father, Joseph Henry Price, was a factory worker and passed on May 27, 1895 at 46 years old. Frederick, our subject, would have been without a father at age 16.
September 3, 1894, Frederick Price beat Mrs. Frank (Anna) Sherman in Neenah in what was called an attempted murder. Frank Sherman worked the night shift at the Paul Paper Company, and Price climbed in the Sherman window around 1:00am. They lived above the Joseph Patzel tailoring shop on Wisconsin Avenue. The newspaper described her as a “comely young woman of good reputation” and a member of the local Methodist church. Mrs. Sherman was beat about the head and shoulders while asleep with a piece of lumber by a man she said was short, wearing no shoes or coat, and with a sheet wrapped around his face. Police suspected murder rather than robbery because her pocketbook was untouched. Mrs. Sherman was able to fight off her attacker, screaming “murder!” and running to a connected apartment occupied by John Hoeffer (could be John Hofer, b. 1867). Her screaming was loud enough that it also attracted Officer Watts, a beat cop. Price escaped out the window, and ran as Watts fired his revolver.
Price was not a suspect and remained free for two months. A private detective from Chicago named Coleman assisted Neenah police and was able to find Price and “pump” him until he confessed. Price said he was playing a prank and wanted to move the furniture and make the Sherman couple think the devil had visited them in the night. He claimed he was interrupted by Mrs. Sherman and then beat her to escape. Police felt Price was mentally unbalanced and his mother acknowledged he was “rather wild” and caused “no end of trouble.”
December 3, 1894, Price pleaded guilty and was sent to the Waukesha Industrial School until he was 21 years old (about 5 years). At the time, it was claimed Price’s cruelty was inspired by cheap novels. It’s unclear how long he was in there, but we know it was less than three years.
First marriage to Rose Smith, who Price met in Neenah in the 1890s. They married in 1897 in Wheaton, Illinois, lived in Wisconsin Rapids and had a child. Price briefly worked at a trunk factory in Wyandotte, Michigan while Rose operated a grocery store and was active in the Salvation Army. The child died young, and the woman left Price and returned to her home in Michigan. A divorce was allegedly secured at Green Bay in 1902, but this was later disputed. Rose moved to New York City and later Aurora, Illinois, getting remarried to man named Reddan.
September 3, 1902, Fred Price married Grace Gertrude Swartz in Rockford, Illinois. Newspaper accounts suggest it was an elopement, as friends were not told in advance. Price, now living in Wisconsin Rapids, was identified as “a commercial salesman of excellent reputation and a successful man of business.” Swartz was the daughter of a Methodist minister. They bounced around from city to city, but this marriage did not last long. They divorced August 9, 1905 with the reason being “extreme cruelty and threats to kill.” Price had allegedly said he would shoot Grace.
Next married Mary Fridley in Minneapolis on October 2, 1907. Fridley had been the granddaughter of Abram Fridley, the Minnesota pioneer and state legislator for whom the town of Fridley was named. Her father, David Fridley, was a wealthy landowner. He was generous with Mary—and suspicious of her traveling salesman husband. Fridley had ensured that during the marriage his daughter had kept her accounts, bonds, and land holdings under her control.
November 28, 1914: Price’s friend and business partner Charles D. Etchison had turned up with tickets for the musical The Prince of Pilsen at Minneapolis’s Metropolitan Theatre.that morning and suggested the outing. After the show ended, Price proposed that the three of them motor to St. Paul. Mary, the husband suggested, could collect her cocker spaniel Chum at the apartment and bring him along.
It was during that drive from their Minneapolis apartment near Loring Park to scenic East River Road that the Cadillac’s engine seemed to stall. Price pulled over. Since he and Etchison would be tinkering under the hood for a while, Price said, why shouldn’t Mary take Chum for a walk?
Mary Fridley Price’s decision to give her dog some air was her last. Just beyond the parkway’s thin fringe of trees, the land dropped off. Somehow, within minutes of exiting the car, both woman and dog toppled some forty feet.
Fridley Price died on the way to the hospital, the fracture to the left side of her skull proving fatal. Chum died later, when police located the severely injured dog and shot him. Surgeon R.A. Schnacke found it unusual that Mary’s head was hurt but her neck was not broken in the fall.
The police and coroner agreed with Price’s and Etchison’s story: that Chum had bolted through the trees only to find a drop off, and Mary, in an attempt to save him from going over, had lost her footing and gone down with him.
With his wife’s death, Fred Price became the administrator of her estate. And he was free to marry Carrie Olson, the stenographer he had been seeing since 1913.
March 22, 1915, Price sued the city for $7,500, saying they were negligent for not having a railing on the cliff.
David Fridley did not believe his daughter’s death was accidental. He found it too coincidental that it happened shortly after he transferred $20,000 in securities to her. With another son-in-law, William Dye, he hired private investigator John P. Hoy, the former Minneapolis police detective who had helped solve the infamous Harry Haywood murder case in 1894.
Hoy investigated Price for ten months. The detective made his way to Price’s hometown, Neenah, Wisconsin. There he learned that a local boy who had fallen off a roof and lain unconscious for hours had grown into a teenager who beat a neighbor woman senseless with a stick of wood for the sheer “deviltry” of it. That teenager was Price.
Price’s lawsuit came up in October 1915 and the city said Price had no grounds to sue because he was not legally married to his wife – he had never divorced his first wife, Rose. Price withdrew the lawsuit, but the city retaliated and had Price charged with bigamy in mid-November. He was held on $3,000 bond. Mary Fridley’s estate was also held up in probate – Price was not her legal heir if he was not her legal husband.
December 1, 1915, first-degree murder charges came for Price and Etchison. Ethison was in Washington, DC at the time and arrested immediately.
December 8, 1915: Etchison, despite confessing immediately, pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder. He said he was only an accomplice because his silence was purchased for $4,700. Etchison insisted Price had planned the murder three months in advance and picked out the spot, and after flinging his wife over the cliff, threw the dog with all his might to create the cover story. At the bottom of the cliff, Mary was still alive, so Price hit her in the head with a rock and then hailed a passing car to get her to the hospital.
December 8, 1915: Price spoke to the press, saying he would reveal unsavory things about Etchison. “I will issue a statement within the next few days that will disprove Etchison’s story. I will show just how much of a saint Etchison really is.” However, after talking to his attorney, he changed his mind and said, “I would gain nothing by saying anything now, but something is coming and I will wait until the proper time to say it.”
December 9, 1915: Carrie Olson Price was in Neenah, staying with sister-in-law Mrs. Charles Jensen, as she had nowhere else to go. Carrie freely told press that prior to her husband’s arrest she had never met the Jensen family. Charles Jensen was the head of a department at Kimberly-Clark. This same day, detective John Hoy was in Neenah investigating Price’s early years there. Hoy also spoke with Carrie for three hours.
December 28, Mary’s body was ordered exhumed to be re-examined.
Starting January 4, 1916, newspapers from different parts of the country covered Price’s Minneapolis murder trial.
January 10, prosecutor Armstrong told the press there was evidence that Price was going to keep murdering – he had reason to believe that Price was going to kill both David Fridley (the father) and Mrs. Emma Fridley Dye, Mary’s sister, so that the entire inheritance would flow to him.
January 12, Etchison, the state’s star witness, testified that Price had plotted his wife’s murder for months and offered Etchison $4,700 to be a witness and keep quiet. He said if he did not help, not only would he not get the money, but Price promised to wreck his home and destroy his furniture. That night in 1914, he had shoved her off a steep cliff in Minneapolis and thrown her dog after her. Only Fridley Price hadn’t died in the fall. So Price, after nearly an hour of scrambling, found his way down and stove in the semi-conscious woman’s head with a rock. On this day, “hundreds” of people were packed i nthe courtroom to hear Etchison’s every word.
Etchison then told the story alluded to earlier by Armstrong. He said he was at Price’s home and “there were three electric light buttons in the room. The light for each was turned on. ‘I will show you how I will get it,’ Price said to me. ‘Let each one of these lights represent the life of a member of the Fridley family. First there is old David Fridley. He is too stingy to live. I will poke his life out like I would that light.’ And Price pressed the first button. ‘Then there is Emma Dye. She is the second button. I will press her life out just as easily.’ One by one Price pushed the buttons. The room was in darkness. I screamed aloud to him to turn on the lights. He was grinning cruelly when the glare of the lights showed me his face. ‘My God, man, you don’t mean that!’ I cried. ‘By God, I do!’ he answered.”
The jury went out on January 16 and remained out for 20 hours. From the beginning, they were in favor of guilt 11-1, but the one juror held out. Interviewed in the jail, Price said, “I wish the jury would agree. This is the worst strain I have ever been under. I know they will find me innocent.” Price was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in Stillwater Prison. Price and his attorney MC Brady vowed to appeal for a new trial, saying, “Guilty, guilty, guilty. They call that justice? I am innocent and the world will learn it.”
County prosecutors debated whether or not to bring Charles Etchison to trial, or if getting Price was justice enough. He had still not gone to trial by May 1916 and was released on bond.
David Fridley never got over his daughter’s murder. In March 1926, he hanged himself in his basement and was found by a housekeeper. Fridley was 77 years old.
Inmate Price, employed in the prison’s twine-making business, died four years later in April 1930 of pneumonia and complications from diabetes.
William Morris Dye, the Fridley in-law who assisted in investigating Price, passed on December 4, 1939 in Minneapolis. His wife, Emma (Mary Fridley’s sister) passed in 1950. As near as I can tell, David Fridley had no grandchildren and where the family fortune went is unknown.