... Accounts of Erich Muenter's early life are sketchy. Muenter was apparently born in Germany about 1871 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1890; however, he would in his later life fabricate a whole host of completely different origin stories, as his tenuous grip on reality slipped away. He alternately claimed to have been born in Texas or Wisconsin, the son of German immigrants, or in the South as the son of landed aristocrats, or that he was of Finnish extraction forced to emigrate to the United States by Russian persecution- and unsurprisingly, given the infamy of his notorious actions, his true origin story is heavily disputed. Muenter clearly possessed a natural gift for languages. He demonstrated fluency in German, French, Spanish, and Finnish. His German accent was almost imperceptible, except on the few occasions when he was seen by friends to explode in rage; most who met him thought he merely had a mild speech impediment.
Muenter took his Bachelor’s degree in German at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1899. In 1902 Muenter married a young woman named Krembs, who acquaintances described as “a pleasant German-American woman,” and as a “a woman of striking beauty.” She taught school in Chicago for a brief period. 1903 found Muenter and his wife at Kansas State University, where he took some graduate courses. There he authored a paper entitled “Insanity and Literature”, and his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy.
In 1904, Muenter hit the big time: he was accepted for doctoral work at Harvard University, and was permitted to teach undergraduate courses in German language. One of the faculty members at Harvard said that “in the classroom Professor Muenter was very calm and precise, and had much charm of manner.” Muenter and his wife lived in modest rooms at 107 Oxford Street in Cambridge, which they rented from Thomas W. Hillier, a local livery stable owner. Hillier later recalled that the only evidence of strangeness Muenter had shown was his bizarre conviction that “a wonderful new language could be built up out of Gaelic and Scots” (actually, newspapers published the report as a language built from combining “Gaelic and Scotch”, making this conviction even more bizarre). Muenter was affable, if quiet; an excellent scholar and linguist, and meticulous in the classroom. He was always neatly dressed, sporting a neatly groomed moustache, a Vandyke beard, and a stylish derby hat.
Yet even then, his university colleagues already saw dark oddities in Muenter’s behavior. There were three separate occasions on which neighbors accused Muenter of blowing out the gas lights in his bedroom, in an attempt to asphyxiate his sleeping wife. Muenter claimed that the gas had been blown out by the wind — a common hazard in the days of gas lighting — and the neighbors’ accusations were dismissed as over-active imagination. Certainly, his landlord had vouched for Muenter, claiming that Muenter had seemed genuinely concerned for his wife’s fate. He showed moments of irrational behavior- he “discovered” a poem which he touted as a previous unknown masterpiece of German literature. A German literary society pointed out that it was a fairly well-known work of Goethe, and Muenter seethed with anger for months over the affair.
Professor Hugo Münsterberg later recalled that while Muenter was at Harvard, “he often came to my laboratory... for the purpose of borrowing books on insanity. Some of these he needed to write theses on insanity. Others he would borrow because he was interested in the subject.” Münsterberg thought Muenter was a “pathological study” even before he emigrated to the U.S., and that “the man was always interested in mysticism and metaphysics”. He added, “I can scarcely imagine any man being a more interesting psychological study that this man Muenter.” Several associates recalled that he obsessed over sexual matters (the details of which were apparently too risqué to detail in Edwardian newspapers)- and one reported that he had, with some friends, formed “a secret organization for the study of medieval mysticism.” This report in particular has been seized upon, and forms the basis of the popularized 'Infernal' conspiracy theory, alleging that many other disasters and terrorist incidents can also be attributed to the actions of the occult 'Infernal Society', which Muenter allegedly founded during his Harvard days- however, these conspiracy theorists' allegations are baseless and without merit.
While at Harvard, Muenter’s wife gave birth to their second child. By early 1906, she was pregnant a third time. But this time, something went terribly wrong. She was, from all accounts, a strong, healthy woman. Yet with this pregnancy, she seemed to grow weaker and weaker with each passing week. Friends of the family attempted to bring in a physician, Dr. H. B. McIntyre of Boston, to attend her in her confinement (a quaint but dysfunctional Victorian custom of keeping a woman housebound during the final months of pregnancy). But Erich Muenter would have none of this; he 'did not believe in doctors', and his wife meekly acceded to the dismissal of Dr. McIntyre. On April 16th, 1906, Muenter’s wife died before she could give birth to their third child. There was no attending physician at her deathbed, in accordance with to her husband’s demands.
Muenter turned her body over to a local undertaker, A. E. Long, to be prepared for burial. Long, an experienced mortician, grew suspicious when he began embalming the body. There was something not quite right with the look of the woman’s internal organs. He called in Professor Whitney of the Harvard Medical School, who conducted an impromptu autopsy. He determined that Mrs. Muenter had died from the cumulative effects of numerous small doses of arsenic. Throughout her confinement, her husband had laced his wife's beef tea with poison. Long and Whitney went to the Cambridge police with their information. But before the Cambridge police could obtain an indictment for murder against Muenter, the case took a bizarre and fateful turn. Muenter took his two children and his wife’s corpse, placed them all in an automobile, and drove off to Chicago. On the 19th of April, he had his wife’s body cremated, in a vain attempt to destroy the evidence of his crime. Abandoning his children to his sister’s care, Muenter fled the country, to Mexico...