Game warden shot fisherman, walked in 1900 murder case

Two unemployed telegraph linemen looking for work on St. Paul's East Side happened upon a deadly confrontation on the Mississippi River on Sept. 19, 1900.

George Creps and Harry Thornton first heard shouts — "Hold up your hands, don't move" — booming from a boat containing five men "armed to the teeth" with guns and packed with liquor, according to later testimony.

They were hollering at Joseph Mrozinski, a 59-year-old immigrant fisherman in a skiff with his 21-year-old son, John. The men in the boat, having just been deputized as game wardens, suspected Mrozinski was using nets to illegally poach fish.

From their riverbank perch near Pig's Eye Lake, Creps and Thornton watched one of the deputy wardens, Edward Corbett, fire at the elder Mrozinski's head from a few feet away. "Witnesses of the affair say that Mro­zinski was shot without justifiable provocation," the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

Mrozinski fell forward into the river and floated for 75 feet, "staining the water with blood," according to press coverage of the testimony, "but the wardens made no attempt to secure [the body]."

The fisherman's body washed up in Newport two weeks later with a silver dollar-sized bullet hole in his right cheek. But jurors cleared Corbett of murder charges two months later, buying his self-defense claim even though he had changed his story.

"This has been a dark cloud on our family history for the past 120 years," said Jan Hawkes of St. Paul, Joseph Mrozinski's great-granddaughter. She said shame had kept descendants from talking about the case — though Joseph's youngest daughter, Tillie, one of his 14 children, continued pleading for justice to Gov. Harold LeVander into her 80s.

"She was 10 at the time of the murder, and she went to her grave feeling that justice had not been served," said Hawkes, who calls the case "a travesty of justice" that robbed her family of its honor.

Born in Poland in 1841, Joseph Mrozinski was 43 when he arrived in New York on the German steamer S.S. Neckar in 1885 after a chilly voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. He disembarked with his wife, Veronica, and their first seven children, including 5-year-old John.

The five game wardens at first insisted that John's gun had accidentally discharged. Corbett stuck to the story until police gave him an early ballistics lesson at the station after the shooting. When Joseph's body turned up, they warned, they would know whether his son's 10-gauge gun was the deadly weapon or Corbett's 12-gauge.

Corbett promptly confessed, pivoting to a self-defense claim and explaining how the deputy wardens had all agreed on the accidental-shooting story because they "feared violence."

"I did not shoot until I saw the two Mrozinskis standing up in their boat with their guns pointed at us," Corbett said in jail. "I shot to save my own life, as I believed at the time."

That contradicted what Creps, of Winona, and Thornton, of Milwaukee, said at Corbett's murder trial. Neither had any "interest whatever in the outcome of the case," the Pioneer Press reported when the trial opened.

The two witnesses testified that the father and son "made no moves to pick up the guns which were lying in the bottom of the boat" before Joseph Mrozinski was shot. When asked on the stand if he could identify the shooter, Thornton nodded at Corbett.

The younger Mrozinski testified that they had brought guns on the skiff because his father wanted to find out who was stealing their nets on Pig's Eye Lake. John said he overheard Corbett tell one of the others that he'd long had his "gun loaded with buckshot" for Mrozinski.

One of the wardens, Charles Stubbs, testified that the Mrozinskis had pointed their guns at them in midstream, with Joseph threatening to kill them if they didn't return his fishing nets.

Another witness, a police officer and former game warden, testified that Joseph had threatened the year before to "take his flint and blow your head off" if he took the Mrozinskis' nets again.

After deliberating only 25 minutes, the jury acquitted Corbett, who showed no emotion when the verdict was announced. He shook hands with the jurors before heading home to tell his wife and three kids the news. He had been in jail for two months.

"From this moment on," Hawkes and family members would write in their own account of the story, the Mrozinski family began "their own lifelong sentence of shame, embarrassment, and loss of family honor."

One final twist: Rumors had swirled that Mrozinski's floating corpse carried his life's savings in the lining of his coat and vest. When the body was discovered in Newport, the St. Paul police chief ordered a tight watch on it because of the reported cash. But one of Mrozinski's sons insisted his father couldn't have had more than $2 or $3 on him when he was killed. In the end, there was no silver lining.

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.