Feature Legend: Feb. 2001
By the turn of the century San Antonio had become a metropolitan city. Tourism was a big business, and the Mahncke site was central to the city's business section. Real estate developer L. J. Hart, along with twelve other local investors, including Jot Gunter, purchased the site from Mrs. Mary E. Vance Winslow in 1907 at a cost of $190,000. Mr. Gunter died before the hotel was completed, but the hotel was named to honor him.
The new hotel officially opened on November 20, 1909. It was an eight-story, 301-room structure and the largest building at the time in San Antonio. November 21, 1909 the San Antonio Light gave a write-up of the formal banquet that heralded the opening.
The new hotel became the center for cattlemen to gather. It had its own laundry, heating plant, barber shop, and water system with an artesian well in the basement.
In 1917 a ninth story was added, and then, in 1926, three more stories were added, with the "Gunter Roof," with a Japanese garden.
Along with all the pomp and ceremony, and probably the most unusual, fascinating, bizarre unsolved crime in San Antonio police files occurred at the Gunter.
On February 6, 1965, a blonde man in his late 30s checked into room 636 at the Gunter. He registered as "Albert Knox" of Youngstown, Ohio. Later, police found the address he gave was a vacant lot, and the only Albert Knox in Youngstown was a black man who had never visited San Antonio.
During the next three days the man, who was about five feet nine inches tall and weighed around 160 pounds, occupied the room. He was seen going in and out of the hotel several times, accompanied by a tall blonde woman in her thirties.
On the morning of Monday, February 8, the maid on duty, Maria Luisa Leja, said she changed the linen in the room and straightened it up. On the same day, the afternoon maid, Mrs, Maria Luisa Guerra, prepared to check the room. Thinking the occupants had forgotten to remove a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door, she opened the door with her passkey. As she stepped inside, she saw an Anglo man standing beside a blood-soaked bed. According to an account in the San Antonio Express News on February 10, the maid, upon discovering the man, screamed. The man laid a finger against his lips as if cautioning her to be quiet. Then, he scooped up a blood-soaked bundle and disappeared out the door.
Searching the room for clues, the police found what they said were the small footprints of the apparent victim. They also found several cigar butts, one of which bore the imprint of lipstick!
A police dog was brought in to follow the suspect's apparent trail. It led to a window leading to a fire escape. There police found two drops of blood, but the trail turned cold, apparently washed away by a light rain. In the room they found a suitcase containing a man's shirts, some cheese, sardines, and several empty wine bottles. Officers also found blonde hairs in the room, as well as nylon hose and women's underclothing.
On the bed, officers found the shell of a fired .22 caliber bullet. A .22 caliber slug was found embedded in a wall near a bloodied chair. This led detectives to believe the woman had been shot, possibly with an automatic pistol, from the bed, as she sat in the nearby chair. Bloody trails indicated the slayer had to make several trips to the bathroom, presumably to wash the parts of a dissected body. A recent interview we had with former Detective Frank Castillon, who was a Homicide detective assigned to the case, revealed that during the investigation, a bloody "water line" was found in the bathtub. Detective Castillon's theory is this is where the body was butchered and washed.
Mrs. Guerra, the maid who discovered the man in the room, said the bloody bundle she saw was about a foot high and some 20 inches or so long and wide. Officers said the body of a small boned woman, dissected and blood-drained, could have fit the dimensions of the bundle.
The room was a bloody mess. The mattress and floor were covered with blood. The commode was sticky with a "red substance." The bathroom was literally covered with blood. While no body was found, it was theorized by some that the body had been butchered in the bathroom and perhaps then run through a meat grinder. At that time, Dr. Ruben Santos was the assistant medical examiner. He agreed that there was enough blood to indicate a butchering. Dr. Robert Hausman, the medical examiner, was out of the country at the time of the occurrence. He disagreed that there had been a butchering, saying he believed from police photographs that there was not enough blood. He also discarded the theory that a body was slowly run through a meat grinder and then flushed down the hotel bathroom commode. He projected the theory that the woman had given birth and the blood came from that, a theory that Frank Castillon has never agreed with. And then what would explain a bullet hole in the chair and the wall if this is what had taken place? No, Frank Castillon still stands firmly by his belief that there was definitely enough blood to indicate a butchering took place in room 636.
Checking out any clues they could find, Detectives Castillon and his partner, Bob Holt, discovered the suitcase they found in the room had been purchased on February 3, just prior to the time the man going under the name of Albert Knox had registered at the hotel. It was bought at the San Antonio Trunk and Gift Company at 211 Alamo Plaza, by a man who had used a personalized check of a Mr. John J. McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy turned out to be the stepfather of a Walter Emerick, the real name of "Albert Knox." The detectives then checked local restaurants to find the source of the cheese, wine, and sardines. When they visited Schilo's Delicatessen, at 424 E.Commerce Street, they learned a man, later ascertained to be Emerick, had dined with a "blonde woman" and had purchased $12.80 of take-out food, including the cheese and sardines. He had used a similar check to the one used to pay for the suitcase at Alamo Trunk. When questioned about the "John J. McCarthy" who signed the check, a restaurant employee surprised the officers by answering, "Oh, Mr. McCarthy didn't sign the cheek, it was his stepson, Walter something or other . . . I believe it is Urick. The MeCarthys are regular customers." Evidently, the restaurant management recognized Mr. McCarthy's stepson and didn't want to make a big deal over his signing his stepfather's check.
Now suspecting a forgery case, District Attorney's investigator M. R. Nugent, who had joined Castillon in his investigations, went to the hot check section where he learned that "Walter Urick" was really "Walter Emerick," and a forgery charge had indeed been filed against him only the past week. Emerick was Mrs. John J. McCarthy's son by a previous marriage. He had had a previous forgery record and had served time. Fed up, apparently, with her son's habits, his mother had accused her son of taking fifty personalized checks on January 17. Learning that Emerick had a previous police record, fingerprints expert Captain A. M. Davenport matched up the fingerprints found in room 636 of the Gunter with those of Emerick's police record. The police finally had a suspect!
A statewide alert went out for Walter Emerick, a thirty-seven-year-old unemployed accountant. But just hours later, the police were to come to the end of a dead-end street.
Sandor Ambrus, Jr., a security guard at the St. Anthony Hotel, located just a block away from the Gunter, became suspicious of one tenant who had checked into the hotel under the name of "Robert Ashley" on Tuesday. Arousing his suspicions was the fact that Ashley had not allowed the maids to enter the room to clean it.
Ambrus called in city and county officers and they went to room 536 at the St. Anthony. (Checks with that hotel revealed the man who signed in as Ashley had tried to rent room number 636 at the St. Anthony! When he found it was already occupied, he settled for room 536.)
Detective Castillon was with the security guard and asked him to use his key to unlock the door, fearing a sudden knock on the door might upset the man, who was thought to be armed. The guard was quite nervous, according to Castillon, and jangled the keys against the door, thus alerting the occupant.. A shot rang out from within the room! Detective Castilion said he pushed the door open and was the first to reach the man, who had shot himself in the temple. He was still clutching his .22 caliber pistol. The detective asked him if he had killed anyone at the Gunter Hotel, but the man could only make a few gurgling noises" before he expired.
In the St. Anthony room, a shirt was found which had been washed or rinsed out in an effort to remove blood stains. Also, cigars of the same brand as those found in the Gunter room were among the effects. And, of course, as police had no doubt, "Ashley's" fingerprints matched those found in Gunter room 636.
To this day, no body has ever been found. Police were never able to match fingerprints which were lifted from the room. No woman was ever reported to be missing. One police theory is that she may have been a prostitute.
One interesting twist did come to light during the investigation, when two sales clerks in a downtown department store later identified Emerick as the man who had come into the store and ordered a very large meat grinder!
At the time all this occurred, there was a lot of downtown construction going on, and green dye, used to color cement, was found on Emerick's shoes. One theory remains alive that he may have entombed parts of his victim in still-wet cement at one of the downtown construction projects.
The case is still open. No body has ever been discovered. The murderer, if indeed there was a murder, was dead by his own hand. A homicide detective was heard to say, "The best case we have is malicious mischief over $50. It took a couple of hundred dollars just to get the room clean," he added.
The original room 636 had been divided into two rooms so it is not the original crime scene. And, of course, all drapes, furnishings, carpets, etc. have been replaced. Only the tiny octagonal tiles, so popular in years past, in the bathroom, are the only orginal room feature surving today.
Members of the hotel's executive staff have claimed that there have been some unusual "happenings" from time to time in the famous landmark.
An executive who has been there for some time says that a woman in "ghostly garb" has been seen a number of times in the vicinity of room 636 where the activity took place. Two security guards reported sightings at different times, usually very late at night. On at least two occasions, hotel guests have been awakened by loud hammering noises, sometimes gunfire in the rooms adjacent to theirs. When security guards were summoned to investigate, the rooms next door to the complainants were found to be unoccupied. The guards would check around, then leave, go back downstairs, and the noises would resume with no explanation.
Former staff member Jackie Contreras, who worked in the sales office said in 1990 she had a very frightening experience. She had gone to check on a room that had been made ready for some very important hotel clients. She went to the door and knocked. When no one answered, she opened the door with her passkey. The room was pitch black. She thought this rather strange, since the maids customarily would draw the drapes to allow sunlight to come into a room that had been made ready for guests. As she groped in the darkness for the light switch, she said the light coming in from the hallway revealed a "woman standing in the room. She was looking straight at me, her hands reaching towards me. She looked very old, and stooped, and was white as a sheet. She was wearing a long white gown." Jackie said she backed out fast, closing the door behind her. She went down to the lobby and told the people at the desk they must have given her the key to an occupied room. They assured her this was not so; the room was not occupied, as the maid had just finished making it ready for new occupants. She said as she is fully convinced the woman she saw was a ghost, and she still gets cold chills whenever she recalls that afternoon and the woman she saw in that dark, dark room.
At Christmas time, 1990, a group of the hotel employees gathered together to celebrate at an informal Christmas party up in the ballroom. One of those in attendance took some photographs of the gathering. One developed photo showed an extra personage in the picture . . . someone showed up with the group, who was not of the group.. . and nobody knows who it was, except another human form is very visible in the picture.
The ghost has been somewhat dormant since the early 90's though the noises are still heard from time to time-JLB
The End.
A Note From JLB: I just recently asked my Dad about this story because he was the one who told me about it first. I was twelve or thirteen when he told me and I forgot a lot of his details. But, as he recalled there was never a blonde seen with Walter Emerick but, it was said that a couple of pregnant women where seen with him. He had (my father) a theory that several people believed at the time. He believed Emerick was preforming illegal abortions hence both the blood and no bodies found. Well that's it for now until I find more info-JLB.