Baehr Wilhelmina01

Waupaca Republican

September 20, 1907

IN PRIOSN 16 YEARS

Mrs. Wilhelmina Baehr of Shawano County Liberated by Governor Davidson

After serving sixteen years in State’s prison one half of her life, Mrs. Wilhelmina Baehr was set at liberty Sept. 6, by pardon of the governor. She entered prison a girl wife, ignorant of the law, unable to speak English. She left it a broken, faded woman. Half of her life had been sacrificed to the greed of a husband old enough to have been her grandfather.

In 1891 Wilhelmina came to Wisconsin from Germany. She was then scarce 15 years old. Her parents took a farm in the woods in Shawano County, and a few months afterward she married a widower named Baehr, because her parents told her to.

Baehr was twenty-five or thirty years her senior and had children older than she. He was known as a grasping man, willing to get money. Wilhelmina became his household drudge.

One night a traveler, Michael Sells, stopped at the Baehr home for the night. Apparently he had money. The greed of Old Man Baehr was excited and he resolved to put Sells out of the way. Accordingly, he told Wilhelmina to put poison in the food she gave Sells for supper. She did so and Sells died the next day.

Confronted with arrest, Baehr put the blame on his child wife and she was accused of the crime and put in jail. When her trial was called her husband advised her to plead guilty, telling her that if she did so she would escape with a light sentence in jail.

The girl did as she was told, instead of giving her a light sentence; the judge sentenced her to state’s prison for life. Even then she did not realize how great her punishment was to be, and on the day that she was taken to prison she told her friends she would be back in seven months.

Soon after she entered the state penitentiary her husband committed suicide, driven to it it is claimed by remorse for his act in compelling his wife to poison Sells. After Baehr’s death the case of the girl wife in the state penitentiary was forgotten and she was left without friends.

Two weeks ago several wealthy and influential citizens of Oconto County interested themselves in her behalf and a petition for her pardon reciting the facts in the case was laid before Gov. Davidson. He investigated for himself and became convinced that justice had been satisfied.

Mrs. Baehr will return to Shawano County, where those of her people who are still alive reside, and begin anew a life so sadly interrupted. She was a model prisoner, and learned to speak, read, and write English during the sixteen years she was in prison.