Nancy Stiles graduated in May with a master’s degree in history from the College of Arts and Sciences. Stiles is utilizing her degree and her background in journalism to examine the life of Nellie Tipton Muench, a St. Louis socialite who was involved in two prominent criminal cases in the 1930s. Ideally, her thesis will serve as the basis for a narrative non-fiction book. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

In 1934, a grand jury handed up indictments in the 1931 kidnapping of St. Louis physician Dr. Isaac Kelley. It was no surprise that a collection of five ex-cons and petty crooks were brought to trial for the scheme.

However, a sixth conspirator was also named: Nellie Tipton Muench.

This shocked St. Louisans and piqued the interest of local and national news outlets. Muench was a fixture of St. Louis society. She and her husband, a respected physician, were residents of the exclusive Westminster Place enclave and, for a time, she was the proprietor of The Mitzi Shop, an upscale dress salon. She also happened to be the daughter of a prominent Baptist minister and sister of a Missouri Supreme Court judge.

As surprising as it was that a member of the upper crust was implicated in such a crime, things only got stranger from there. Six weeks before her trial, Muench announced she had given birth to a son in an effort to drum up sympathy for herself. In reality, she obtained the baby from an unwed domestic servant from Pennsylvania and was simultaneously blackmailing and extorting her lover, claiming the child was his.

While Muench beat the kidnapping rap, she was convicted of mail fraud related to the blackmail in 1936 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The sordid episode of kidnapping and blackmail captivated the city and generated a media circus, but it also belied the story of a woman who imagined a life beyond her station as a daughter, sister and wife.

University of Missouri–St. Louis graduate Nancy Stiles examined Muench’s story and how media coverage of the case intersected with gender in her master’s thesis, “A Most Despicable Hoax: Women, Crime, and Newspapers in Depression-Era St. Louis.” Stiles successfully defended the thesis in April, graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences with an MA in history. After three years of working on the project, she hopes it will serve as a basis for a narrative non-fiction book on Muench.

“This thesis was very much a labor of love and only touches on a very small part of this story,” she said.

Stiles traces her interest in history to “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” Erik Larson’s best-selling book detailing the inner workings of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the machinations of H.H. Holmes, who is considered one of the country’s first serial killers. The book, which was a high school reading assignment, had a lasting impact on her.

“I feel like it’s the first book that I read that made me understand what narrative nonfiction could be, and it’s kind of why I decided to go into journalism,” Stiles said.

Stiles pursued that ambition, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Missouri–Columbia and New York University, respectively. After working for a few years in New York, Stiles returned to St. Louis around 2014 to be closer to her family.

She was a staff writer at the Riverfront Times for several years before falling victim to layoffs and then moved to Feast Magazine, where she served as managing editor. In 2019, she made the jump from journalism to a tech startup.

Muench’s story came to Stiles’ attention around that time thanks to social media. A “this day in history” post from a Facebook page about St. Louis history caught her eye and sent her down a rabbit hole.

“Being a nerd, I of course had a newspapers.com subscription,” Stiles said. “I just started looking into this in my free time, and I was like, ‘This is so interesting.’ I was thinking about pitching it as a feature to RFT or St Louis Magazine, and the more I started researching it, though, the more I thought, ‘This is more than a 3,000-word story.’”

In her mind, it deserved to be a book, but she wasn’t sure she had all the tools necessary to undertake a project of that scope.

“I obviously have spent a lot of time writing,” Stiles said. “I know how to write, but I thought, ‘I don’t really know how to do historical research. I don’t know how to do historical analysis.’”

That’s when UMSL came into the picture. In late 2019, Stiles met with Professor Andrew Hurley to discuss her idea. Hurley assured her that a master’s thesis could be a starting point for a book and encouraged her to apply to the program.

Teaching Professor Peter Acsay served as Stiles’ thesis committee chair and provided a useful grounding in the era, particularly his course on the history of St. Louis.

“I looked at crime during this period in America,” Stiles said. “The focus of my thesis was basically media coverage of the case intersecting with gender. How she used her gender for a long while, successfully, and then at the end, not so successfully, to try to get out of the case. How the paper covered her, and how it covered her specifically as a female criminal.”

Stiles noted that kidnapping had become a popular racket for criminal organizations during the 1930s with the repeal of Prohibition. Gangs in cities such as St. Louis and Chicago had made money hand over fist bootlegging, and they moved to replace that lost cash flow with ransom schemes. The cases provided plenty of tabloid fodder, but Stiles posits Muench grabbed headlines because of her place in society as a well-to-do woman, as well as evolving societal norms.

“What you’re seeing, too, is that newspapers are starting to see women as an audience, and by that, I mean advertisers are seeing women as an audience,” she said. “I think that plays into it as well. This is a case that a lot of women were interested in for obvious reasons.”

Her research also led to a deeper understanding of Muench as an individual and her motivations in the kidnapping and blackmail plots.

Muench grew up comfortably in Pike County, and on the surface, her marriage to Dr. Ludwig Muench was a perfect picture of domesticity. However, Muench had a habit of billing Mitzi Shop clients for orders they had not placed, and she was sued by several creditors. She also gravitated toward a rough crowd, which would eventually be revealed by tavern owner Adolph Fiedler.

Three years after the kidnapping of Kelley, Fiedler implicated Muench in the crime. But she successfully moved to have her trial severed from the five others and for a change of venue to Mexico, Missouri – boons for her defense. An Audrain County jury would surely be familiar with her father, Rev. William Tipton, and the family’s sound reputation.

But would that be enough? Muench wasn’t so sure. Thus, after more than 20 years of childless marriage, a 42-year-old Muench announced the miraculous arrival of a son.

“Certainly, her motivations were to get sympathy from the jury and sympathy from the public, and she must have not been sure she would get acquitted of the kidnapping charge,” Stiles said. “If she hadn’t done that, I think she probably still would have been acquitted.”

Unfortunately, the pity play landed her in court again. Muench and an accomplice forced 19-year-old Anna Ware, an unwed domestic servant, to give up her baby under duress. After seeing the kidnapping case make front-page news, Ware filed a habeas corpus writ to have the child she recognized as her own returned.

The Missouri Court of Appeals appointed a special commissioner – Rush Limbaugh Sr. – to resolve the strange case. Months of testimony from a cast of colorful characters uncovered Muench’s affair with an extremely wealthy Central West End physician and colleague of her husband, Dr. Marsh Pitzman. Muench had convinced Pitzman that the miracle baby was his, and a paper trail, consisting of a flurry of letters to Pitzman, showed that she was bilking him to pay her legal fees.

Ultimately, Limbaugh ordered the infant be returned to Ware. The letters to Pitzman provided the basis for federal mail fraud charges and resulted in prison sentences for Muench, her husband and two accomplices.

It’s easy to see why Muench captivated the media and the public, but Stiles hopes she can help people see beyond the scandal and the headlines. After three years of research, she’s found Muench to be a complex figure – a big personality who wanted more for herself.

“The thing that I really took away from it – after I was done defending the thesis and I had to talk through a lot of things at my committee – is the empathy that I have for her,” Stiles said. “She certainly was guilty of the baby hoax, and I think she was guilty of the kidnapping. She did things that she shouldn’t have done and did her time for them. But I can understand why she wanted a bigger life for herself. She was someone trying to come to terms with, and I’m sure many people feel this way, her life not turning out the way that she wanted it to – not being satisfied with the roles that society offered to her. Society sometimes just expects you to fade away, and she was someone who certainly was not content to do that.”