MLB Star Martin Bergen, Killed His Wife and Children With an Axe

Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. Today on our series ‘Men Who Kill Their Wives’, we are going to go way back to the year 1900, when a horrific murder-suicide took place by a professional baseball player.

On January 19th, 1900, Marty Bergen, characterized as the best catcher in baseball history, killed his wife Harriet and his two children, three year old Joseph and six year old Florence, with an axe. After killing his family, Marty then used a straight razor to forcefully cut his own throat.

What led this MLB Player to kill his entire family?

Listen in to learn more…

SHOWNOTES:

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

00:06.8 S1: Welcome to pushing up Elise. I’m your host, Julie Mason. Pushing up lilies is a weekly True Crime podcast with spine tingling unusual and terrifying-ly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? 00:30.9 S2: I like to look back at really old cases sometimes, because it’s amazing how far we’ve come with DNA and just investigations in general. I ran across a case of Tamil side, which is kind of what we’ve been covering this month, in the cases of Shanann Watts and Lacy Peterson, where someone actually kills their spouse and also their children, and so going back like this happened way back in the 1900’s, and you wouldn’t really think that… I don’t know, I know stress levels were high even back then because people worked and owned farms and had careers, but it just seems like the stress of the hustle and bustle these days would actually push people to the limits more frequently. It’s hard to imagine not being a love back then, that the stress level would be high enough back in the 1900s for people to commit the same crimes that they’re committing now, I don’t know, maybe longer jobs to work may be unreliable. I’m sure you still have issues with co-workers that people have these days, the stress of just being a parent in general, I guess, was still there, so I sat down and started thinking about it and I was like, You know, it’s really not that unusual that it would have happened back then. 02:00.7 S2: There was a case of a major league baseball player, I found this kind of funny because the team he played for was the Boston Beaneaters, and I’m not sure who came up with that. It’s very creative and unusual, I have to say that for sure, but I mean, I don’t know if I’d be proud to staff play for the Beaneaters, I don’t know, it’s not like the Cowboys are the blocking or the bison or all those teams that we follow, it like, I was a big eater. It’s just weird. But that was the name of the team that Marty Bergen played for. Now, he played… And this, again, was a Major League baseball team. He played from 1896 to 1899. 02:49.5 S1: I mean, that was a head of a long time ago. 02:52.4 S2: He suffered a lot from paranoia hallucinations, and they’re conflicting stories on whether or not he ever sought help or treatment, he was thought to be an alcoholic because of his behavior at malpractice, and a lot of the guys that he played ball with thought that he just drank a lot, and that was what caused his strange behaviors, but he still remembered as one of the greatest catchers in MLB history, so this guy is still well-known and is still somewhat celebrated. Now, he lived in Brookfield, Massachusetts. He lived with his daughter Florence, his son, Joseph and his wife Harriet. He had actually bought a farm, it was kind of not too far from the city, but it was a farm house, about one and a half stories. Everyone said that it was really important to him to provide for his family and to spend time and be there for his kids, his strange behaviors though, had gone on for a long time, so he felt like someone was always out to get him, and I know we’ve all met that person that… What was me? I call them Eeyore’s, where something’s always wrong and somebody’s always out to get them or after them, or wants their job, just beautiful. 0:04:24.2 S2: Being around people like that, in many cases, some of the teammates that he played with on the beaneaters MLB team, we’re actually afraid of him, he would occasionally just abandon the team for days, just decided he didn’t wanna play and just disappear, and then when he came back, they would let him play. I mean, that wouldn’t happen these days, right, if an MLB or an NFL player just decided to jump the bus on the way to a game or not show… It wouldn’t happen, they wouldn’t get to keep playing, so anyway, he had reportedly consulted a physician and even a clergy to get some help from them. But it really didn’t pan out. Again, there’s some conflicting stories that say that he never tried to get help, we will never know, ’cause it was so long ago, trying to get those medical records from 190, there was no psychiatry yet though back then, and there was really no effective way to deal with this condition, so they believed that he was kind of schizophrenic, paranoid, delusional, just angry, those types of things, but they say that even from childhood and as a teenager that he showed signs of anxiety and stress… 0:05:52.1 S2: Of course, I don’t know much about his background, other than the fact that his brother Billy also played Major Lee baseball and was very good… They were both catchers and were very well known. He married in 1893. His wife was actually three to four years older than him, the strange thing is, reading about this, the bee-eaters had a regular catcher that played for them, and he was trying to hop a train and ended up falling, both of his legs had to be amputated, so this was in 1893, and the team had a really hard time finding his replacement. And so it wasn’t till 1896, three years later that they actually found Marty Bergen and he was hired as a catcher for the team. He would say that after this season ended, he would love to beat some of his team members. He commonly fought with teammates. In 1898, he actually struck Hall a Famer Vic Willis in the head during breakfast with, I believe, a baseball bat, and then after an altercation on the bench with teammates, that’s when he said he actually wanted to bludgeon in some of his teammates with a band. Now, supposedly, his son, Willis died of Diphtheria or Willis, his son Willy died of Diphtheria at the age of three. 0:07:27.0 S2: Again, some articles say age of three, some say age of five, so there’s a little bit of a difference, and I’m sure the standards for journalism were not near as high back then as they are now, so… We’ll just say that, but his son died of Diphtheria, of course, we have a vaccine for that now, but it wasn’t developed until the 1920s, so kind of missed that boat, but he had to miss the funeral because he was on the road so much for the baseball team. So the story is that he would ask for time off because, reportedly, it was important to him that he got time off to be with his kids and he wanted to provide for his family. That was obviously a big deal for him. The fact that he couldn’t be there for the funeral when his three or five-year-old passed away was a big deal, and so when he would ask for time off to be with his kids or to be with his family, if he was told No, he would take it anyway. He would get off a train and go home when they were on their way to a baseball game, they really just wasn’t reliable, although he was really good, and that’s one reason why they kept him because he was such an amazing catcher, but not always there. 0:08:46.3 S2: Again, just kind of did his own thing and they continued to let that happen. 0:08:50.9 S1: I mean, his altercations and disagreements with the team continued because he was always fighting them, he got to the point, he felt like someone was watching him, he thought that his wife was poisoning him at one point, he started walking sideways because he thought was gonna come up behind him and try to kill him, and so if he walked sideways, he could look both in front and in back of him, which that’s weird, if you and I saw somebody walking down the street sideways, we’d be like, What the hell, like, ‘Something’s wrong with that person’. Again, the sad, sad part is we’re talking about mental health issues, and back then there were just no people to help me, there were no psychiatrists, not a lot of medications that you could give to these people that wouldn’t put them in a practically vegetative state. Unfortunate, right? That he was born back in the 1800s and not in 2020, because he could have functioned probably as a normal human… Had that been the case? Which I don’t know, it’s not… But anyway, what this guy did was kill his wife, his six-year-old daughter, and his three-year-old son, of course, he’d already lost the other three-year-old son, but he then slit his own throat with a razor, and a lot of the news stories say that he nearly decapitated himself, and then through the knife on the near by table where it landed and was found, a lot of people were criticizing law enforcement for assuming that he did it and that it wasn’t a homicide, because the knife was on the table and he was on the floor after collapsing because he had decapitated himself. 0:10:45.6 S2: I think a lot of that is just journalism and the way the stories are written, and not so much what went down, because who knows, someone could have picked up the knife and put it on the table because there was such a big deal made about the knife being on the table and him being on the floor, and the fact that he wouldn’t have been able to lay the razor down after he practically decapitated himself caused a lot of issues. And again, someone could have picked it up found on the table, but journalism just was different, like I said, and a lot of it is the way the stories are written. Any of us, and of course, I had journalism experience, won Journalism Awards in high school and actually wrote for a newspaper once, and I’m still writing my investigation reports. It’s very important the way you word things, I mean, who knows, they may have had very high standards or even known what they were doing, I mean, it was a long, long time ago. So, he killed the entire family, and they’re thinking that it’s probably sometime between bedtime and breakfast because it looked like everyone was in their bed clothes at the time of the murders. It looked like he had actually started his morning ritual of taking the ashes out of the fire place and putting newspaper in there, he normally would put wood on the fire before the family got up, but he had not yet put the wood on the fire. So reportedly, his father Michael found the entire family. He stopped by the house to pick up milk and then discovered the entire family dead. Bergen was in the kitchen in a pool of blood, his throat was cut, again, a razer was on a nearby table. His daughter Florence was beside him and she had severe damage to her skull, apparently he beat the entire family with an axe. And we know he could swing, so I’m sure he had strength in his arms. Harriet and Joseph, the three-year-old were in bed and they both had head wounds. 0:12:55.0 S2: Now, a lot of us in forensics are gonna have a lot of questions again. That would probably never be able to be answered. I’m sure there was no DNA testing on the razor. There are a lot of things that probably weren’t done because of just the time that it was… The general consensus is that it was a suicide. And again, such a shame that healthcare was different back then, and the medications that we have today weren’t available to him. Of course, normally all of these stories, he’s in prison here, and he was bludgeoned by other inmates because he killed children. That’s what we would expect the end to be, but in this case, he is actually deceased. So just reminded me, when I was in nursing school and I was in Vernon, Texas, and I was at the state forensic mental institution, or mental hospital there. And I think I’ve mentioned that to you before, we were able to actually go into the common area where they had foosball tables and shuffle board and coffee pots, and everyone was allowed to just congregate in this area during the day and watch TV together. 0:14:14.7 S2: We were allowed to just choose whoever we wanted, and sit and talk to them and discuss why they were there, what they did, and of course, we also had access to the medical records. And so we were allowed to go in that room and read all about all these people, and we can do it before we talk to them, or we can wait and do it after. Sometimes it was fun to kinda guess why they were there because honestly, they’re medicated and a lot of them at this point seemed normal, that was the scary part about it. I think, to me is I kept thinking to myself, If I saw this person in public, I would totally think they were a normal person, like… He does not look like a serial killer, he does not look like he would gouge someone’s eye balls out and eat that, it was just a very eerie feeling that had gone from medications, which they didn’t have back in the 1900s. Of course, I don’t know his name, I wouldn’t remember it if he told me… ’cause this was back in 19, probably gosh, 93. But he told me that he killed his entire family, I think he had three children, and then he killed his wife, and then he burned his house down, and so I’m sitting next to this guy and he’s just telling me this story, so matter of factly like just going to work like, Hey, this happened. 0:15:36.2 S2: And it just blew my mind. And of course, I don’t remember how much time had passed since he had done it, since I talked to him, so… Plus, there’s medication, so he did not show emotion, he was very matter-of-fact and told me when I asked him Why did it that he heard voices, and it was obvious he was schizophrenic and paranoid. 0:16:00.5 S1: Of course, I was younger back then and a little bit nervous. 0:16:04.7 S2: Honestly, and so there are a lot of questions I can think of now that I wish I had a aspect then, but I didn’t… Because I didn’t know what I know now, and I haven’t seen the things that I’ve seen back in 93. So it blows me away how medications can stabilize people and they can seem normal. A lot of us honestly probably work with a lot of people who would straight up kill us or their co-workers if they didn’t have their medications, again though, super crazy to that things like this happened way back then. Again, I don’t know why, but I just figured that the stress levels were easier to deal with, but in thinking back, I’m sure they suffered from stress and anxiety and depression, the same as people do nowadays, it just often goes undiagnosed and untreated, as do a lot of mental illnesses now. Super sad that so many people are suffering and can’t afford healthcare and are unable to get their medications filled and take the medications that they need to not only survive in a crazy stressful world, but also just manage everyday illnesses like diabetes and hypertension, but don’t get me started on that. 0:17:30.3 S2: Know when I did home healthcare, I had several patients that I would go check on who were unable even with insurance to afford their medications for high blood pressure, and I would go to the pharmacy and pick up their medications, and many times they were only five or 10, but knowing that I was able to do that and help them, I can’t go to their house and check their blood pressure every week and it be 200 over 150, and then go home and sleep at night, knowing that I could have helped. And I didn’t… Again, it wasn’t that they were non-compliant and unwilling to take these medications, it was just that they simply could not afford them, and so that’s the case. We all know these days with many people who are unable to, and we do have the non-compliant people who just think that they are immune from illness, and regardless of the fact that their father died of coronary artery disease at the age of 40, that they’re gonna live to be 110 without ever seeing a doctor. And those are things we see in healthcare all the time. Anyway, I wanted to share this story with you all because it’s not one that you’ll see on Netflix, and it’s not one that you’ll see in a documentary because it’s an old story, and it’s not Jonbenet Ramsey, and it’s not Scott Peterson, it’s not… 0:18:59.6 S2: Chris Watts… The new stories are interesting, but the old stories are to me too, just for different reasons. Just looking back at the story, I cannot imagine using a razor and sliding my own throat to the point that I’m nearly decapitated, and that could have been a little bit of a stretch for the people who wrote the articles as well. But I just cannot imagine doing that and it has to be a dang sharp raiser, I tell you what. Anyway, something to think about, mental health status, if you have issues and need to talk about them, if you don’t have a friend or a family marriage, you can confide in, there’s always somebody that you can talk to, and many different organizations that provide help and counseling that are free of charge, and I know that nurses… We serve as makeshift counselors for our patients many times, even in different career fields as a nurse, we almost feel like bartenders, people share things with us that they don’t otherwise share, even in current scenes that I go to, people share drug addictions and those types of things, with me, that they won’t share with police because I’m not in a uniform.