In the quiet, tree-lined suburb of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, the summer of 1925 was shattered by a crime that still echoes nearly a century later. Arthur Louis Schumacher, an 8-year-old boy known to everyone as "Buddy," was a kind-hearted and cheerful child who attended Lincoln Elementary School. Born on September 2, 1916, to Arthur and Florence Schumacher, he lived a simple, happy life with his older sister, Jeanette. But on a warm July morning, that peaceful existence came to a brutal and mysterious end.
On July 24, 1925, Buddy left his home around 9 a.m. with a group of neighborhood friends, intending to spend the day at a local swimming hole on the Menomonee River. To get there, the boys hopped onto a passing freight train, a common adventure for children of that era. It was after they jumped off the train that Buddy was last seen alive by his companions.
When he failed to return home that evening, his frantic parents began a search that would soon grow to involve the entire community and law enforcement from across the state.
For seven agonizing weeks, the search for Buddy yielded nothing. The community held its breath, hoping for the boy's safe return. That hope was extinguished on September 12, 1925, when a man foraging for mushrooms in a wooded area discovered Buddy's badly decomposed body hidden in the brush, just a mile from his family’s home. The horrific details of the discovery shocked the peaceful town. Buddy's clothing was torn, and a handkerchief with the initial "A" embroidered on it had been shoved deep down his throat. The cause of death was determined to be suffocation, and evidence suggested he had been sexually assaulted and mutilated.
The Wauwatosa Police Department's investigation immediately focused on several leads. Two of Buddy's playmates identified a local vagrant named Edward Vreeland as a man who had chased them on the day of the disappearance; they said they ran away, but Buddy did not. Vreeland had been arrested for vagrancy just two days after Buddy went missing, found in the same woods where the boy was last seen. Though he denied involvement, he admitted to memory lapses resulting from an old head injury. The case against him seemed to solidify when a woman initially identified the handkerchief found with Buddy as one she had washed for Vreeland, but she later recanted, and the boys also withdrew their identification, stating they felt pressured by police. With no other evidence, Vreeland was released.
Another promising lead emerged in November 1925 when William Brandt, a 21-year-old serving a life sentence in a Minnesota prison for the strikingly similar murder of another young boy, confessed to killing Buddy. He claimed he remembered seeing the boys and hiding the body, but couldn't recall the murder itself. However, his confession was riddled with inconsistencies. Brandt claimed Buddy’s body was bloody and that he had discarded the boy's overalls in a drainpipe, but Buddy was found clean of blood and wearing his overalls. Brandt also claimed to have torn the handkerchief to remove his initials, but the embroidered "A" was found intact. He later retracted his confession, and though some investigators believed he was the killer, he was never charged in Buddy's death.
The investigation was further complicated by the discovery that at least four other children had been attacked or molested in the Wauwatosa area around the same time. The case received intense media attention, with sensational headlines tracking every development. After a viewing was held at their home, Buddy's family laid him to rest, but they would never receive justice. His parents, Art and Florence, rarely spoke of the tragedy again, and two years later, they moved away from the house filled with painful memories.
Decades have passed, but the murder of Buddy Schumacher has never been forgotten. The case was the subject of a 2012 book, "Murder in Wauwatosa: The Mysterious Death of Buddy Schumacher," written by an author who grew up in the Schumachers' former home. As of January 2015, the crime officially remains one of Wisconsin's oldest and most haunting unsolved homicides. The original police files from that era are long gone, and with them, any remaining clues that might have finally answered the question of who took the life of a little boy on a summer day in 1925.
