The Strange Case of Lancelot Cooper
Eva Cooper (Lewiston Sun Journal)
A distressing phone call
Waldo Skillin wasn’t expecting a phone call at 12:42AM, but he was used to getting phone calls at odd hours because of his job as a doctor.
The voice on the other end of the phone was one he recognized—it was his patient, Eva Cooper. She was clearly in distress, and she said that she had just regained consciousness. She asked him to come quick—there was an intruder that had stripped her naked, tied up her hands and legs, and left her on the living room floor. It was as much as she could do to get to the phone and dial his number. She had used her teeth to pull the receiver off the hook. She was relieved that the intruder was gone, but she wasn’t sure what condition her husband, Lance, was in.
Dr. Skillin, who was 30 miles away, asked her if she had called the police already, and she said she hadn’t because she was completely nude and embarrassed for them to see her.
Dr. Skillin got off the phone with her and immediately dialed the Brunswick Police headquarters.
Police arrive to the scene
It was the wee hours of the morning of Thursday, January 18th, 1951, and Maine was frozen.
Police pulled up in the front of Building F and made their way to Unit #4. They weren’t sure what they would find. Though they had called the apartment’s phone, they were unable to reach Eva. Last they knew, the intruder had left... but what if he had returned? They ascended the stairs with their guns drawn.
They could hear a woman screaming from the inside of Unit #4. They entered the apartment and found Eva in the living room. The intruder had vanished. They immediately clocked the bloody scene in the master bedroom, but returned to Eva to render aid.
Eva was on the living room floor—nude and bound. Her arms were behind her back tied with a purple wool scarf, and a black gauze-like wool scarf covered her face. A light-green dress that the cops figured she had been wearing was laying torn in the living room. She didn’t appear to be hurt.
The crime scene
The bedroom was a bloody mess.
There was a pool of blood about 2 feet in diameter soaked into the left pillow on the bed and onto the sheets and mattress below. They found Lance’s body on the floor next to the bed and the amount of blood was incredible. The wood floors were covered in an oil-slick of dark-red blood.
One of the medical examiners determined that Lance had three deep wounds to his head—one to his forehead, one behind his right ear, and a third to the back of his head at the base of his skull. One of the gashes was six inches in length. They were horrific wounds that fractured his skull. Dr. Ferguson noted that they were “undoubtedly” from “being struck with a heavy knife.” Either of the two wounds to the back of the head, they estimated, would have been fatal.
Initial statement from Eva
Police officers asked Eva what had happened, and she explained to them that she was in the kitchen around 10:00PM getting ready to do some dishes while listening to a basketball game on the radio when she heard a knock at the door. She answered it, and there was a man standing before her, his face covered by a Halloween mask, and his hand holding a pistol pointed right at her. He ordered her back into the apartment, and she complied. She remembered shouting to her husband, but then said she blacked out and remembered nothing more until she regained consciousness. Upon waking, she found herself on the living room floor, bound and nude, and struggled to the telephone to call Dr. Skillin.
Officers checked Lance’s bedstand and pockets and found that there were valuables that had been left. Lance’s watch, his wedding band, and a billfold containing $58 were all in the bedroom on or near his body.
It led police to conclude that robbery had not been a motive. This attack seemed personal.
Police started tearing into Lance’s life—who was this 56-year-old man, and how had made such a violent enemy?
Lancelot Henry Cooper
Lancelot Henry Cooper was born in 1894 in South Windsor, Maine, and was a standout athlete—a star football player and basketball player. Around the time he graduated from Cony High School in Augusta, Maine, in 1912, he was already expecting a son. It’s unclear which happened first, but he married his first wife, Grace, on November 14th, 1912. His son, Lancelot Jr., who went by “Lanny,” was born the same year.
Two years later, in 1914, Lance and Grace had a second son. Around this same time, World War 1 had begun, and Lance enlisted with the US Navy.
By the late 1910s, Lance had returned to the Northeast. He worked at steel ship manufacturer in Bath, Maine, called the Texas Steamship Company. The company shuttered in 1921, and sometime around this same point in his life—when he was in his early 20s—Grace and he divorced.
He soon remarried to a woman one year his senior, also named Grace, who was from another well-known family in Augusta.
Around May of 1930 when he was 36, he began work at Bath Iron Works, becoming one of the first eight welders that they employed. Shortly after, he was promoted to “leading man” in the welding department, a position that he would hold until his death.
In 1933, Lance married again to his third and final wife, Eva Sawyer, who took his last name to become Eva Cooper. Eva, too, was a widow, and she had 3 kids from her previous marriage. She was 27, and he was 39.
In 1945 he was elected president of the Bath Country Club. He was a prominent member of the local Elk’s Lodge, eventually becoming the chairman of the Board of Trustees. He participated in the Masons and the Lions Club. He was also government leader, first elected alderman and then later city councilman when the structure of the town’s governance changed.
13 years into their marriage, in 1946, Eva, having tired of living in Bath, left Lance. They separated for some time—she moved to Portland while he continued to live with his mother and work in Bath. They remained married but estranged.
In 1949, Lance’s mother passed after a long illness at the age of 78. After burying his mother, Lance joined his wife in South Portland at 144 Spring Street. A year later, they moved to Brunswick, Maine, and got a 2-bedroom apartment in one of the nice new post-war buildings in town. They were designed primarily for veterans who had returned from war and were attending local Bowdoin College. Eva and Lance were one of the older couples in the building.
And that’s the apartment where Lance met his violent end in 1951 at the age of 56.
Lance’s murder was not just a blow to his family but to the entire community. Everyone seemed to be grieving, except one person—someone surprisingly close to Lance—his wife, Eva.
From Eva’s perspective - leading up to the murder
Though we do not know what Eva’s thoughts and feelings were, based on the source material, this is what we imagine them to be.
Eva was sick of her husband.
When he joined her in Portland after his mother’s death, things were getting tense. She called the Portland PD in May of 1950 for help in dealing with him. He was constantly drunk and waving a gun around—even threatened her with it according to police records. No charges were filed against Lance in connection with this incident. He spent two days in the psychiatric hospital until Eva showed up, and, against the advice of two hospital doctors, she signed his release and brought him home. Things had come to a head, and to Lance’s credit, he quit drinking in the summer of 1950.
She dreamt of the romance that she’d had back in 1942 when she met a man named Ernest Zachow—a former boxer and boxing trainer. He would sometimes be in town from overseas—he was enlisted in the military during World War 2—and he brought some excitement to her otherwise drab married life.
When Eva called Dr. Skillin from Brunswick, she certainly expected him to come to her aid. She had an intimate relationship with the doctor. Plus, he would know what to do. But the doctor had called the police.
By 4:00AM, they had brought her to the police station, where she calmly endured their questioning. They kept asking her the same things, and she kept giving them the same answers. She was composed. They couldn’t seem to get it through their thick skulls—a man had come to the door with a mask, threatened her, she passed out, and when she woke up she called the doctor. That’s the whole story.
But as time went on, and she realized that she wasn’t being released from jail, she knew she had to do something. She had been reading the newspaper and saw a familiar face—Ernest Zachow—he had been written up in the paper for some boxing affair. They needed a man to pin this on? She served one up to them. “I remember now!” she said. “It was Ernest Zachow! He’s who came to the door.”
Cops’ perspective on Lance’s murder
The cops dutifully looked into Ernest.
They went to his residence in Portland and brought him down to the station. They asked him where he had been the evening of Wednesday, January 17th—one week prior to his questioning. Before even having any clue what the questioning was about, he produced an alibi—he was at the YMCA gym that night, teaching boxing until 9:00PM. He then returned home and listened to a Groucho Marx program on the radio—a detail that his wife corroborated.
The cops knew they were spinning their wheels, but they wanted an airtight case.
When they had arrived at the Cooper apartment, they at first believed it had been a home invasion, just as Eva had said. But things started to strike them... oddly. Eva was not well-bound. They were able to remove the scarf that bound her hands behind her back without even untying the knot—it simply slipped off. If she were to have fainted, would she have remained unconscious for such a long time? Why she stripped of her clothes? Why did she have no injuries.
They took her to the station where they questioned her from 4:00AM to 5:30PM—13-and-a-half hours. And it was during that questioning that they became convinced that there had been no mystery man at the door.
Eva’s story seemed to change as they presented her with evidence. “Why are there blood stains on your right arm, Eva? If you were in the living room unconscious until phoning the doctor, at what point did blood end up on your arm? Why is there blood on your slippers?” they asked. Eva said she hadn’t even been in the bedroom. Under the pressure she had to give them something, so she admitted that she had bound her hands and blindfolded herself and stripped off her own clothes. “Why?” they asked. So that if her husband came out of the bedroom, he could see that “the man attacked her as well as him.”
They had heard enough. County Attorney Daniel McDonald told the press that Eva was being charged. On Friday afternoon, she was arraigned at court in Brunswick, where the judge told her that the state believed she, with malice aforethought, had murdered her husband. She was held without bail.
The trial of Eva Cooper
On Monday, June 11th, the time had finally come for Eva to face a jury of her peers.
On Wednesday, the prosecution called to the stand Eva’s neighbors, and the night of the murder began to come into clearer focus.
At 7:30PM that Wednesday night, William Murphy, who worked for Bowdoin College and was a friend of Lance and Eva’s, went by their apartment to give them tickets to a sporting event that night happening at the college. Finding no one home, he slid the tickets under the door.
10 minutes later, at 7:40PM, David Mullin and his wife, who lived across the hall from Lance and Eva, said that Lance visited them and complained of not feeling well. He offered the sports tickets to them, but they declined. Between 9:30PM and 10:00PM, the couple was listening to a radio program called “Mister DA,” in their unit, and afterwards, they went to sleep. They didn’t hear any noise. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Around this same time Gordon Milliken, a student at Bowdoin, returned home, and he lived in the unit directly below Lance and Eva. At 10:25PM he heard three sounds: the first was a sharp sound; the second was a duller one; the third was another sharp sound. He was at that moment seated at a desk almost directly below the bedroom where Lance was killed.
At 11:00PM his roommates returned home, at which point there was no more noise at all from their upstairs neighbors until police arrive around 12:30AM.
The prosecution continued to lay out their case, pointing out the many incriminating and contradictory things that Eva had told them.
Dr. Skillin was the first defense witness. He said of Lance that he once had a tendency to run naked into the street and “holler from the rooftops” after drinking too much.
The prosecutors, though, during cross examination, elicited some shocking testimony. Dr. Skillin said a quantity of codeine was found in the house, several Amytol tablets, and some powdered Amytol in waxed paper in Eva’s pocketbook. Amytol is a barbiturate and a powerful sedative. The prosecutor planted the seeds of a story in the jury’s mind.
Ernest Zachow, the boxer, was called to the stand. After explaining their amorous history, Ernest was asked if his name appeared often in the newspaper. He replied, “Yes.” And he added that he believed his name had been in the paper the Saturday after the murder. The same day Eva had fingered him as the culprit.
This wasn’t the only thing in the newspapers that seemed to have made it into the case. The $1,700,000 Brink’s robbery in Boston which was still unsolved had made it into the Portland Evening Express the night of Lance’s murder. It was a one-year later retrospective. It told of men wearing grotesque masks, having guns, and of their hostages being tied up—details that were suspiciously similar to Eva’s story of the evening.
The judge, with gravitas, said, “You are the hopper into which the mass of evidence has been fed. From that hopper must come the truth, and the truth alone.”
Eva Cooper is guilty
Court convened on Saturday, June 16th, the 6th day of trial. They returned at 1:30PM to complete deliberations and at 3:00PM they returned to the courtroom.
The foreman said, “We the jury find the respondent... guilty... of manslaughter.”
And in a surprising turn of events the judge immediately imposed sentence—the maximum—10-20 years.
Through her lawyer, Eva told the press that she was innocent—that another person had killed her husband.
Eva Cooper served time in the Women’s Reformatory in Skowhegan, but we are uncertain how many years.
We know that she lived many more years. According to the obituary of a family member in 1973, she was alive and living under the name Eva Cooper in Old Orchard Beach. We don’t know how much time she served, but in 1973, Eva was free, and she was 67 years old—young enough to marry again.
Evangeline Marjorie Sawyer Cooper died on October 17th, 1985 at the age of 77.
This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The Bizarre Case of Lancelot Cooper. To learn more and hear Lance Cooper’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.
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Lancelot "Lance" Cooper (Portland Evening Express)
Evangeline "Eva" Cooper (Lewiston Daily Sun)
Dr. Waldo Skillin (Portland Evening Express)
Eva and Lance's apartment building, Bowdoin Courts Apartments, in Brunswick, ME; Lance's car in foreground (Portland Evening Express)
Vernon Bornheimer, Edward Marks, Philip Wheeler, left to right (Portland Press Herald)
Harold Whittemore (Sun Journal)
Crime scene, bedroom, Philip Wheeler, left, and Daniel McDonald, right (Portland Evening Express)
Crime scene, bedroom, where Lance was killed (Sun Journal)
Crime scene, murder weapon, Police Chief Joel Lebel (Pejepscot Historical)
Philip Wheeler, left, John Marks, right (Portland Press Herald)
Eva Cooper, being booked at Cumberland County Jail (Portland Evening Express)
Eva Cooper, being booked at Cumberland County Jail (Portland Evening Express)
Eva Cooper, being booked at Cumberland County Jail (Portland Evening Express)
Dr. Franklin Ferguson, Maine General Hospital
Dr. Joseph Porter, medical examiner
Ernest Zachow, identified as killer by Eva Cooper, testified at court (Kennebec Journal)
Eva Cooper, leaving funeral at Corliss Street Baptist Church (Portland Press Herald)
Police Chief Lebel and another man (Pejepscot Library)
Florence Hessal, Brunswick police matron, demonstration (Pejepscot Library)
Eva Cooper with attorneys Clark Chapman, left, and Walter Chapman, center (Pejepscot Historical)
Evangeline Cooper at Brunswick Municipal Court, prelim hearing (Sun Journal)
Brunswick Municipal Court, gallery (Sun Journal)
Jury for murder trial, 14 seated (Portland Press Herald)
Eva Cooper at Cumberland County Jail (Kennebec Journal)
Eva Cooper, police matron Barbara Pike, Vernon Bornheimer, at jury field trip (Evening Express)
Brunswick Police Chief Joel Lebel, left, Maine Attorney General, Alexander LaFleur, at jury field trip (Evening Express)
Jury field trip to apartment (Evening Express)
Eva Cooper with her son, Roland Record (Portland Press Herald)
Eva Cooper, escorted from courthouse after guilty verdict (Portland Press Herald)
Eva Cooper walking in Town Hall (Pejepscot Historical)
Eva Cooper, shortly after sentence pronounced (Portland Press Herald)
Vernon Bornheimer helps Evangeline into his car after verdict (Portland Press Herald)
Gravestone of Lancelot Cooper (findagrave)
Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles from Brunswick Record, Kennebec Journal, Lewiston Daily Sun, Morning Sentinel, Portland Evening Express, Portland Press Herald, Sun Journal, and the Times Record, here.
Written by various authors including Edward M. Jackson, Harold R. Smith, Joseph D. Kamin, Kenneth W. Berry, Steve Riley, and Victor A. Schlich.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to the Pejepscot History Center (Brunswick, ME) for bringing out attention to this case and sharing their photos with us.
Photos
Photos as credited above.
Online written sources
'Lancelot Henry Cooper' (Find A Grave), 4/24/2012, by Robert Wylie
'Grace May Blaisdell Carr' (Find A Grave), 12/3/2016, by LogicalGMW
'Grace Marrion Kittredge Cooper' (Find A Grave), 4/24/2012, by Robert Wylie
'Charles C. Carr' (Find A Grave), 12/3/2016, by LogicalGMW
'Henry D. Cooper' (Find A Grave), 8/27/2012, by Maine 101
'Earl Edwin Cooper' (Find A Grave), 7/30/2010, by Maine 101
Credits
Research, vocal performance, and audio editing by Kristen Seavey
Research, photo editing, and writing by Byron Willis
Additional research by Kimberly Clark.
Murder, She Told is created by Kristen Seavey.