Seppel Einsmann (1885 – 1959) factory worker

 Seppel was born Maria Mayer, the eldest child of a factory worker and a housewife, in Bruchsal, 20 km from Karlsruhe in the state of Baden-Württemberg. At age 27 in 1912, Mayer was working in Karlsruhe doing ironing, when she married Joseph Einsmann, a plasterer and one year older. The marriage did not go well, and they used the occasion of the husband’s military service during the Great War to separate. Herr Einsmann applied for an official dissolution of the marriage in 1923, but Frau Einsmann did not find out until much later.

During the War, Frau Einsmann worked in an ammunition factory in Pforzheim, and there met Helene Müller (né Banz) who likewise had separated from her husband during the war. When the War ended in late 1918, Frauen Einsmann and Müller and many others were obliged to give up their jobs in favour of the returning soldiers. Einsmann and Helene Müller moved to Mainz, in Rhineland-Palatinate, where they lived together. As in Pforzheim, the better jobs in Mainz were reserved for men. Einsmann had kept one of Joseph’s suits, and in one of its pockets were his pre-war identification documents. With a suitable haircut, Einsmann, using the name Joseph, obtained employment with the occupying French military forces – at a wage that supported two persons. Later Einsmann moved to a security and locking company. Einsmann was generally known to his fellow workers as ‘Seppel’. Helene worked as chambermaid.

In 1921 Helene gave birth to a girl, and Seppel registered the girl’s parents as Joseph and Maria Einsmann.

In 1925 Seppel took a position at Werner & Mertz which made shoe polish under the brand name Erdal. He was promoted to foreman supervising 20 workers. He was regarded as hardworking and always punctual, and was an active union member. He also sang tenor in two Mainz church choirs.

A second daughter was born in 1930. This time the Registry Office noticed that Joseph and Maria Einsmann were listed as divorced. Seppel therefore said that he had fathered the child illegitimately with ex-wife Maria Mayer, and the child was recorded with Maria Mayer as the mother. The tax office was notified so that Seppel paid less tax. He was regarded as a good example of a father.

In August 1931, Seppel had a work accident. His hand went into a cutting machine, and the little finger on the right hand was lost. The stay in the men’s ward at the hospital went smoothly. However the subsequent claim for temporary incapacity insurance ran into a problem. The Reich Insurance Office in Berlin realised that they had two disability cards both of which had been issued to a Joseph Einsmann and with identical data. This led to Seppel being questioned and thus outed. He was charged with false certification in changing civil status and lying about the parentage of the two daughters. There was also the matter that he had been Best Man at a wedding and thus signed that the marriage was legitimate. Seppel’s story was repeated in the press in subsequent months, both in Germany and abroad. 

Seppel sold photographs showing his masculine self, along with Helene and their two daughters. The court appointed two psychologists to give an opinion. The county medical officer Dr Wagner accepted Seppel’s claim that her cross-dressing was only to find work and to gain a family wage. Seppel was also sent to see Dr Felix Abraham at Berlin’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Abraham diagnosed a „transvestite predisposition“. This opinion Seppel rejected.

The trial, 20 August 1932, lasted only three hours. Seppel, as obliged, was present in female clothing. The court accepted Dr Wagner’s opinion, not that of Dr Abraham. Maria’s ex-husband declined to testify. Both Einsmann and Müller were given suspended sentences – to the applause of the court visitors - but had to pay court costs. 

Werner & Mertz continued Seppel’s employment. Seppel, after consulting with the employer, took a vacation that was due, and then returned to work, this time as Maria. Maria and Helene continued to live at the same flat throughout the duration of the Third Reich, and moved to a different address in Mainz in 1945. Maria was referred to as ‘aunt’ by the children, and then by the grandchildren. She died in 1959 age 74. Helene died in 1991 age 98.

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Apparently Helene almost never spoke to her children about Seppel’s life as a man.

There is no record from Helene or elsewhere about who did father her children.

“Einsmann” means ‘one man’, but ironically was two.

Abraham’s diagnosis of “transvestite predisposition” was rather blunt, but as Seppel maintained his male persona outside work as well as in, and kept it up day and night 365 days a year, for 12 years, – and sang tenor in two church choirs - he probably was a type of trans. After 1932, social pressure and public knowledge compelled adherence to a female presentation. The mainstream press went along with the opinion expressed in the court that the male presentation dressing was only to find work and to gain a family wage. However Paul Weber, writing in the lesbian/trans Die Freundin shortly after the trial, wrote “For all of us this matter is no ‘exceptional case,’ but rather the dream of what the reality of a thoroughly masculine woman can look like.”

Would it not have been easier to list Helene Müller, the actual mother, as the mother on the birth registration?

• „Frau Vater. Eine als Mann verkleidete Frau arbeitet seit 12 Jahren auf dem Bauplatz und in Fabriken“. Mainzer Tagesanzeiger, 16 August 1931.
• “Feminine ‘Father’: Woman Who Worked as Man Since the War”. Birmingham Evening Despatch, 16 April 1932: 1.
• “12 Years Pose as Man“. Swindon Evening Advertiser, 22 August 1932: 4.
• "Maria Einsmann, eine tapfere Frau!".Mainzer Volkzeitung. 22 August 1932. 
• “Josef Maria Einsmann,” Die Freundin, 35, 2 September 1931: 2f.
• Paul Weber, “Das Urteil gegen Frau Einsmann,” Die Freundin, 36, 7 September 1932: 2.
• Katie Sutton. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. Berghahn, 2013: 113, 115.
• Eva Weickart, (2020). "Die Frau in Männerkleidung. Der Fall Maria Einsmann. Presseberichte aus den Jahren 1931 und 1932". mainz.de, 2020. Online. (The enclosed PDF includes a lot of press reports on the cas)
• Barbara Trottnow (dir). Frau Vater – Die Geschichte der Maria Einsmann, ZDF German 29 mins 2022.

DE.Wikipedia(Maria Einsmann) EN.Wikipedia(Maria Einsmann)

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The expatriate writer Anna Seghers used Einsmann’s life as the basis of her 1940 novel Der sogenannte Rendel, written while she was in exile in Mexico. She also wrote a film script based on the story, Hier gibt's keine Katharina ('There is no Katharina here'), but it was never filmed.

Berthold Brecht, the German playwright, also wrote a fictional version of Einsmann, Der Arbeitsplatz oder Im Schweiße Deines Angesichts sollst Du kein Brot essen, which is included in the collection of the same name. It was translated into English in 1983.

Barbara Trottnow, a filmmaker from Mainz, made a film in 1995 based on parts of Segher’s script. 25 years later she made a 29 minute documentary directly about the Einsmanns, which included a contribution from Helene’s granddaughter, Erkens.

In 2014 the city-district of Mainz-Altstadt named a square after Einsmann and called it Maria-Einsmann-Platz, using only what should have been his dead name, and with no mention of his wife, Helene.

• Anna Seghers. Der sogenannte Rendel. Volk u. Wissen, 1940.
• Bertold Brecht. The job or By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou fail to earn thy bread. Methuen, 1983.
• Barbara Trottnow (dir). Katharina oder: Die Kunst, Arbeit zu finden. Scr: Anna Seghers, with Heidi Ecks as Katharina. ZDF German 80 mins 1995. IMDB
• Barbara Trottnow (dir). Frau Vater – Die Geschichte der Maria Einsmann, ZDF German 29 mins 2022.  Webpage.

Victor Barker: Part IV - Reactions and afterwards

Part I: origins: daughter, wife, mother
Part II: husband, actor, manager
Part III: the trial
Part IV: reactions, and afterwards


Reactions

John Radclyffe Hall, in the doldrums after her novel, The Well of Loneliness, had been found obscene and banned in November 1928, and who partially cross-dressed herself but never really tried to pass as a man, wrote: 'I would like to see [Colonel Barker] drawn and quartered. A mad pervert of the most undesirable type'. Radclyffe Hall considered herself an invert and Barker a pervert, but despite what was said at Barker’s trial about passing as male to earn a wage, it was Barker, not Radclyffe Hall who lived full-time as male.

The novelist DH Lawrence wrote a pamphlet, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, later in 1929. This was to explain his novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and cited Elfrida’s belief that she was “married normally and happily to a real husband” as an example of the profound ignorance about sex in 1920s England.

The sports star, Violet Morris, in Paris, rejected by the French women's sporting authorities for her practice of wearing male clothing and who had just had her breasts removed, sued for reinstatement. She insisted that she was not at all like Barker in that she did not attempt to pass as male.

William Holtom, a timber haulier’s carter in Evesham, Worcestershire expressed great indignation about the Colonel Barker case. However he had recently quit his job after his best workmate had died under the wheels of the horse-drawn wagon he was driving. His health declined and when he was admitted to the infirmary with enteric fever, he was transferred to the women’s ward.

The farm that had been run by the Peace Crouches had since been acquired by Lady Evelyn and Colonel Guinness. Their son Bryan became engaged to Diana Mitford. Diana and her sisters had pored over the Colonel Barker story and she was thrilled to visit the scene of the crime. However she quickly learned that any mention of Barker was taboo by the dictat of Lady Evelyn. (The marriage of Bryan and Diana lasted three years; her second marriage of 42 years was to Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.)


Afterwards

On release Victor continued to live as a man. He still had his £9 a month annuity, but that was mainly taken by his son’s boarding school fees. Barker became John Hill.

He worked six months at a furniture store in Tottenham Court Road, and then became a car salesman, but was twice recognised by female customers who had read of his trials in the newspapers. He worked a little as an extra in films at Elstree studios.

In the summer of 1932 he was in Shanklin, a seaside resort on the Isle of Wight working as an assistant to a fortune teller and also to a diver who went off the end of the pier in an asbestos suit, soaked in petrol and set alight.

In 1934 he was working as a kennelman for 15/- a week in Henfield, West Sussex. On 18 August he found a forgotten purse in the village’s only phone box. On 27 September he was charged, as John Hill, for theft by finding. However his legal name as Valerie Arkell Smith was revealed to the court, which enabled his lawyer to explain his odd behaviour as a fear of being found not to be a man. The jury understood and returned a verdict of not guilty.

John Hill spent the rest of 1934 and 1935 as an assistant chef at two large hotels in Cornwall and Devon. For a few months he was a manservant to a South African millionaire. Then he was servant to a Mrs Adrian Scott, who administered a charity and received 400-500 letters a day from around the world enclosing contributions. There were piles of money in every room. Despite the piles, Hill took five one-pound notes from Mrs Scott’s handbag. A police detective-sergeant came round. Hill unbuttoned his waistcoat to be searched. The detective-sergeant noticed that he was “full in the chest” and realised that he was Victor Barker.

Hill then confessed, and was taken to Marlborough Street Police Court. He was remanded for a week which he spent in the hospital ward at Holloway prison. Although he pleaded guilty the detective-sergeant recounted that Hill was also Barker and also Arkell Smith etc. Hill was fined twenty shillings, and ordered to pay back the five pounds within a month.

This brought Hill/Barker to the attention of Luke Gannon, an impresario in the popular seaside resort of Blackpool.

Gannon’s previous star attraction had been the ex-Revd Harold Davidson, defrocked for immoral conduct with young women.

In 1937 Hill again became Colonel Barker, 'The most famous intersexual character of our time'. The set arranged by Gannon on the Golden Mile at Blackpool allowed viewers who had paid two pence to look down upon two beds separated by a belisha beacon and traffic lights permanently on red; Barker in one bed, his wife in the other.

Colonel Barker in Blackpool

At the boarding house where he stayed, Barker gave the name Jeffrey Norton. The wife from the exhibit, Eva, shared his bed.

After the ex-Revd Davidson’s unfortunate demise in July 1937 (the lion, with whom he shared his act in Skegness, mauled him) his wife sold her story in several parts to The Leader, a weekly publication. As she finished, The Leader started “Colonel Barker, the Man-Woman who Hoaxed the World”, which purported to be Barker’s soon-to-be-published autobiography, although no such book ever appeared.

With the coming of war in September 1939, and subsequently identify cards and then ration cards, Jeffrey Norton and his wife Eva were registered in those names. Jeffrey was working on the switchboard of a local hospital. At the suggestion of the police, he, like many men of his age, joined the Home Guard ("Dad’s Army").

Victor’s son had joined the Grenadier Guards in 1938, and after earning his commission had transferred to the RAF to be trained as a pilot. Mr and Mrs Norton moved back into London, and Jeffrey worked at a factory making Hurricane fighter planes, but he found that his legs could not take the long hours standing at the factory bench. He left and became a night porter at an expensive apartment building in Grosvenor Square.

Victor’s son, now a fighter pilot, announced his marriage, to be held in a church. The father was understandably nervous about signing the marriage register, even as a witness, as the groom’s father would normally be expected to do. So he pretended to have got into the wrong train, and arrived late.

By 1944 the son was a bomber pilot flying over Germany. Jeffrey volunteered to be a driver of an ‘incident lorry’ – to go out during air-raids and mark any signs of bomb damage with red lamps. One night, while driving near Regent’s Park, an explosion blew him out of his lorry, but he survived.

However his son died in the daylight bombing of German garrisons in France after the D-Day invasion.

In 1948, Geoffrey and Eva Norton (he had changed to the other spelling of his name) moved to Kessingland, Suffolk. They kept to themselves. In 1956 Geoffrey’s health deteriorated, and the village doctor had him admitted to Lowestoft Hospital, 4 miles (6 km) away. Initially in the men’s ward, he was quickly moved to the women’s, and then to a private room, although he was not asked to pay for the private room. Eva came regularly, even though the journey required two buses. She pushed him around in a wheelchair.

Despite the National Health Service being up and running, and therefore having no medical bills, Geoffrey Norton was still in need of money, and his solicitor acted as an agent and arranged for Barker’s life story to be sold to Empire News and Chronicle. It appeared 19 February till 15 April 1956. Barker, again writing as Valerie Arkell-Smith, insisted that there was nothing ‘perverted’ in the life that he had chosen.

He had “suffered no ‘tendency’ to become a ‘man’ … I have undergone no physical operation to turn me from woman into man, and physically I am, as I started out in life to be, 100 per cent woman. But so long have I lived as a man, that I have come to think as one, behave as one, and be accepted as one.” This was all done for the sake of his boy. “I ask for no pity or sympathy. You may feel that I do not deserve it anyway and maybe you are right.” 

The story was not picked up by the local press in Suffolk, but the nurses at the hospital read it with interest. The Empire News and Chronicles sent the novelist Ursula Bloom to interview Barker at home as by this time he had been discharged.

He was not diagnosed while in hospital but over the next few years it became obvious that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease as did his mother. Barker was in hospital again in 1957, and in 1958 Eva was admitted, and died in hospital. A neighbour took on the task of looking after Geoffrey, assisted by the district nurse.

He sank into a coma and died in February 1960. He was buried in the grounds of the parish church, in an unmarked grave. He was 64.
________

The definitive account is, of course, that by Rose Collis, which I have largely followed. An excellent book.

Barker lived in many places. If you consult the EN.Wikipedia page for each you will find that in none of them is he listed among the notable residents.

Barker’s account in the Empire News and Chronicle was April 1956, two years before the press brouhaha about Michael Dillon, but two years after Betty Cowell’s autobiography. Most newspaper readers would not then know of female-to-male surgery, but Barker still feels a need to deny it.

Barker claimed at the 1929 trial that he lived as a man for the better wages and for his son, and claimed in his 1956 newspaper autobiography that he was 100% woman.   However he never reverted to living as female, not after his son died in the skies over France, not when he was no longer earning more than a woman would.   His existential need was to be male.

There is no record that Victor Barker ever met Joe Carstairs or any other trans man.   The term was not then in use, of course.   The most common term between the wars was 'female husband'.   Collis gives episodes about other female husbands who were featured in the press, and one assumes that Barker read about them.   There is good discussion in Alison Oram's Her Husband was a Woman! about how the newspapers at that time fitted such tales into standard patterns (although Oram refers to Barker only as 'she' and 'her').
________

*Not the novelist.

• Valerie Arkell-Smith. “The Man-Woman – My Story” Sunday Dispatch, 10 March 1929.
• Elfrida Barker. “My Story: By the Man-Woman’s Wife: Mrs Barker Reveals the Truth”. Sunday Express, 10 March 1929.
• Valerie Arkell-Smith. “Colonel Barker, the Man-Woman who Hoaxed the World”. The Leader, 11 September 1937.
• Valerie Arkell-Smith. “I Posed as a Man for 30 Years! My Amazing Masquerade – a wife confesses”. Empire News and Chronicle,19 February 1956
• Valerie Arkell-Smith. “I posed as a man for 30 years”. Empire News and Chronicle 19 February 1956.
• Julie Wheelwright. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. Pandora 1989: 1-5,10,11,70,157,165.
• Julie Wheelwright. “’Colonel’ Barker: A Case Study in the Contradictions of Fascism”. In Tony Kushner & Kenneth Lunn. The Politics of Marginality: Race, the Radical Right, and Minorities in Twentieth-Century Britain. Riutledge, 1990: 40-8.
• James Vernon. “’For Some Queer Reason’: The Trails and Tribulations of Colonel Barker’s Masquerade in Interwar Britain”. Signs 26, 1 Autumn 2000: 37-62.
• Rose Collis. Colonel Barker's monstrous regiment: a tale of female husbandry. Virago, 2001.
• Laura L. Doan. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. Columbia University Press, 2001: 82-94.
• Alison Oram & Annmarie Turnbull. The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780–1970. Routledge, 2001: 15, 38-43.
• Judith Halberstam. Female Masculinity. Duke Univ. Press, 2006: 91-5.
• Martin Pugh. Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars. 2006: 54-5. 69.
• Alison Oram. Her Husband was a Woman!: Women's gender-crossing in modern British popular culture. Routledge, 2007: 2-3, 63-7, 76-7, 124-5, 150.
• Lyndsy Spence. Mrs Guinness: The Rise and Fall of Diana Mitford, the Thirties Socialite. The History Press, 2015: 54.

WomenOfBrighton     EN.Wikipedia    Aangirfan

Paul Grappe (1891 - 1928) deserter.

Paul Grappe was born in Ronconieres, Haut Marne. He and Louise Landy met in Paris in 1911 and soon married.

Paul was doing his national service as a corporal in the 102nd Infantry regiment in August 1914 when war started. He was sent to the front and was injured a few weeks later. Later in November he lost a finger on his right hand and was accused of self-mutilation. He was found not guilty and told to return to the front. However he chose to desert.

As healthy young men not in uniform attracted much attention, he decided to shave his moustache and to transvest as Suzanne Landgard. Louise found new lodgings. For two years, he stayed in while his hair grew and “destroying the hair roots with electricity”. He made a small living taking in sewing. Louise worked as an artist and cartoonist.

While Paul had never previously worn women’s clothes, he found that he quite enjoyed it.

“I became interested in my appearance as a woman. I began to forget that I was a man. I finally acquired a certain pride in looking pretty.”

Towards the end of the war Suzanne found a factory job, and began to attend the night cabarets of Montmartre and Montparnasse, where she flirted with men.

Suzanne 1925

Susanne and Louise lived for a while in Spain, and returned to Paris in 1922. In 1925 France proclaimed a general amnesty for deserters who had served six months, and Susanne again became Paul.

La famille 1926

The press seized on his story and it was published internationally. Paul found this adjustment much harder than when he became Suzanne. He drank heavily, five litres of wine per day, started to beat Louise and threatened their child.

Finally this had gone too far and Louise shot him, dead. Three weeks later, the child, two years and eight months, died from tubercular meningitis. After a sensational trial, Louise was acquitted, quickly remarried and lived until 1981.

• Paul Grappe. “Lived as a Woman for 10 Years”. The Milwaukee Journal, Apr 5, 1925. http://tinyurl.com/cve98rr.
• “The Historic Instance of ‘Suzanne Langlarde’”. London Life, September 22nd, 1928: 22. Reprinted in Peter Farrer. Cross Dressing between the Wars: Selections from London Life, 1923-1933. Garston: Karn, 2000: 287-8.
• Fabrice Virgili and Danièle Voldman. La garçonne et l'assassin. Histoire de Louise et de Paul, déserteur travesti, dans le Paris des années folles. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2011.
• “Le Travesti de 14-18”. BibliObs, 09-06-2011. http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20110609.OBS4809/le-travesti-de-14-18.html.

Bill Smith (1886 – 1975) jockey, brewery worker.

Wilhemena Smith was born in Sydney, NSW, to English immigrants. Her mother died, her father went back to England, and she was raised in an orphanage. Bill transitioned early to male. He worked as a seaman, and jumped ship in Cairns, Queensland. He worked as a miner and almost twenty years at the brewery in Cairns.

He is best known as a jockey in north Queensland horse racing. He held a joint trainer and jockey licence. He was a loner who arrived already wearing his colours under his street clothes. He never showered at the track, and didn’t speak much to the other jockeys. They referred to him as ‘Girlie’ – a mix of a homophobic putdown because of his shyness, and a suspicion that he might be a woman. Bill both trained and rode winners into the 1950s.

When he retired he rented a one-room flat in a tiny hamlet, Innot Hot Springs, 150 km from Cairns. In declining health at age 88, he was taken to hospital at Herberton 80 km away. He was being admitted into the male ward when a doctor who had treated him before, spoke to the nurse and he was put into the female ward instead even though his pension card said male. He never recovered. The nurses tried to find who he was, and it was subsequently recorded that he was ‘female’. No living relatives were ever found. One nurse painted his portrait.

-------------------
Bill Condon in his book conflated Bill Smith with another Queensland jockey W.H. Smith (1889 – 1914) who won the St Leger Quest in 1902, the Jockey Club Derby in 1903 and the Victoria Oaks in 1909-10.

In 2000 The Australian Racing Museum held an exhibition of women in racing (which was not officially allowed until 1979) and highlighted Bill’s contribution.

In 2005 Bill was chosen for the Women’s History Month postcards using an image of W.H. Smith. Phil Purser’s work at the same time led to more research and the separation of W.H. Smith and Bill Smith.

After Phil Purser’s articles, almost $3,000 was raised for a gravestone in Herberton in the name of ‘Wilhemena Smith’. Phil Purser won the Queensland Racing 2005 award for the Best Print Story.

*Not the farm worker, William Smith, nor W.H Smith, the other Queensland jockey.

• Bill Condon. Those Who Dared. Australia files. Port Melbourne: Heinemann Library, 1998.
• Phil Purser. “Bill Smith was Australia’s First Woman Jockey”. Just Racing. 16/02/05. www.justracing.com.au/features.php?news_page=1&artid=1446.
• Phil Purser. “Dying Jockey Confided in Nurse at Herberton Hospital”. Just Racing. 04/03/05. www.justracing.com.au/features.php?news_page=1&artid=1447&catid=100.
• Phil Purser. “Wilhemena Smith Tribute Now Complete”. Just Racing. 17/08/05. www.justracing.com.au/features.php?news_page=1&artid=1613&catid=100.
• “Wilhemena ‘Bill’ Smith”. Australian Women’s History Forum. www.womenshistory.com.au/image.asp?iID=257.

____________________________________________________________

As with James Barry,  Alan Hart and Billy Tipton, a trans man is turned into a female hero.  If he were a woman in disguise to be a jockey, he would not have continued as male after retirement.

FTM Australia has an article on Alan Hart, but nothing at all on Bill Smith.

Frank Spisak (1951 - 2011) factory worker, serial killer, inmate.

Frank was the son of a factory worker in Cleveland, Ohio, who moved home because too many blacks had moved into the area. He had childhood fantasies of being a woman.  He married at 22, and they had one daughter. He read constantly on Hitler and the Nazis and his wife tried to ignore the issue. He worked in various factory jobs.

At 25 he suffered a head injury in a car accident. In 1977, he started dressing as female. As Frankie Ann, Spisak received treatment from the Gender Dysphoria clinic at Cleveland Metropolitan Hospital, lived as female full-time, changed her ID, saw a psychologist and started taking female hormones. She was also saving for surgery. She was fired from her factory job after turning up as female. Frankie Ann found employment with a maker of eyeglasses until found not to be a woman. She tried prostitution until charged with solicitation, and briefly worked as a Kelly Girl temp. When she brought a trans woman home for sex, her wife and daughter moved out.

But in 1979 the Nazi Frank took over. He collected Nazi memorablia, and played Hitler’s speeches on his stereo. He was stockpiling guns and ammunition. He was also dating a black female prostitute. In February 1982 he found a black preacher in the next stall in the men’s toilet at the Cleveland State University Library and shot him dead. In June he shot a black man at a train station, who survived. In August he returned to to CSU and shot at a female student in the ladies room but missed. He became paranoid about a maintenance worker at CSU who might identify him, and so shot him dead, again in the men’s toilets. The next night he killed a young man waiting at a bus stop.

A week later he got drunk and shot his gun out of the window of his house. For this he was arrested, but was allowed to post bond. An anonymous phone call suggested to the police that they re-examine the guns that they had taken from Spisak’s house, and they were found to match those used in the killings.

Once arrested he admitted the murders, grew a Hitler-style mustache and carried a copy of Mein Kampf. At his 1983 trial, his attorney presented him as crazy but he was not found to be ‘legally insane’. He declared that he was under orders from God, and that Jews were to blame for his transvestite episodes, having seized control of his mind. The jury quickly found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

In jail, Spisak lobbied for a sex change, filed a lawsuit to force the state to refer to him as a woman, and appealed the death sentence. In 2006 the appeal court ruled that he had not received a fair defense and struck down his death sentence. In 2010, this was reversed.

He was executed 17 February 2011. He had been 27 years on death row.

• “Brief of Respondent for Smith v Spisak, 08-724”. www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/briefs/pdfs/07-08/08-724_Respondent.pdf.
• “Frank Spisak”. Serial Killer Central. Oct 11 2004. www.skcentral.com/articles.php?article_id=131.
• Jared Klaus. “Cheating Death: A cross-dressing Nazi murdered a prosecutor's dad 25 years ago. He's back”. Cleveland Scene. Dec 06, 2006. http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/cheating-death/Content?oid=1497024.