Lodi in 1924: How a scandalous divorce led to justice

Murder. Deception. But did she really slap him in the face with a beefsteak?

© Alane K. Dashner

In September 1923 the people of Lodi were horrified to learn that our respected butcher
Alexander Kels had somehow been murdered, placed in the back seat of his
Studebaker, and driven into a fiery haystack. Both automobile and body were burned
beyond recognition. Three thousand shocked people attended the funeral as the body
was buried in the Kels plot near Lockeford and the Kels family offered a $1000 reward
for the apprehension of the murderer.

It Wasn’t What It Seemed

San Joaquin County Sheriff W.H. Ricks and Assistant District Attorney Morgan Sanborn
were suspicious. They began interviewing witnesses about Kels’s actions on the day of
the murder.

That morning Kels had hired an itinerant worker at the local employment agency. In the
afternoon Kels was seen driving with an unknown man in his car. Later he was seen
driving aimlessly around Lockeford, then in Galt, where he purchased and ate sardines
and crackers. Around 7:30pm Kels was seen driving in the direction of the haystack
where a body and automobile would soon burn.

Ricks and Sanborn knew from the post-mortem exam that the burned body’s stomach
had been empty. And they knew that metal fasteners of the kind sewn onto overalls
were found with the body, but Alex Kels never wore overalls. And they knew that Kels
wasn’t as prosperous as people had believed, and that an insurance company was
preparing to pay Kels’s widow $75,000 from his life insurance policy.

A Chance Sighting in Reno

Soon after, it just so happened that a Lodi embalmer was in Reno, Nevada, and spotted
his neighbor Alex Kels alive and well. This led to Kels being arrested and confessing
that he had planned to desert his innocent wife and run to Mexico while still providing for
her. He had murdered the itinerant worker, Edwin Meservey, burned the body and
Studebaker, and it was Meservey who was buried in the Kels plot.
Alexander Kels was promptly hanged at Folsom Prison.

Wait — Why Was a Lodi Embalmer in Reno?

He was getting a quickie divorce so that he could exchange his wife for a much-younger
divorced neighbor.

Thomas Bawden and Susan Jahant (pronounced JAY-hant, as in Acampo’s Jahant
Road) had married at a time of happy optimism in Lodi. After boldly incorporating in
November 1906, in September 1907 Lodi hosted the wildly successful Tokay Grape
Carnival, which reportedly drew 28,000 weekend tourists to our new city of 2,000
residents. A modern electric streetcar was clanging up and down Sacramento Street,
connecting Lodi with Stockton. Electric lighting suddenly lit up the night. It must have
seemed like “the sky was the limit” for Lodians.

Enter young Thomas Bawden from glamourous San Francisco, visiting his Woodbridge
relations. Thomas was an experienced funeral director and had a marvelous singing
voice. He quickly became popular in Lodi, attracting the attention of Susan Jahant from
the well-established Jahant family.

In the spirit of the moment, Thomas purchased Lodi’s Andrew Rutledge Funeral Home
(now Collins) and proposed to Susan. They married in November 1907.

Marriage and Business Didn’t Go As Expected

Strangely, within a year Thomas hired another funeral director to run his Lodi funeral
home and accepted a position as a funeral home employee in San Francisco. Susan
gave birth to their only child there and learned the funeral business herself.
Susan’s father, pioneer Pierre Jahant, died in 1912. In 1913 Thomas and Susan
returned with their daughter to Lodi. Possibly using Susan’s inheritance, Thomas bought
into Frank Hale’s funeral home, creating the longtime firm of Hale & Bawden.
However it happened, Susan began taking the lead financially. She developed a direct
working relationship with the aging Mr. Hale. She bought the elegant Larson residence
at 11 W. Elm Street and converted it to be the Hale & Bawden Funeral Home and
Bawden family residence.

Despite property records that show that she was transacting in her own name, Susan
continued using the job title of “lady assistant” and publicly maintained the fiction that
her husband made the decisions. In this trying-too-hard passage, a1923 journal states
that “Mr. Bawden from the outset entered heartily into the management of the business,
his experience making him one of the most capable men in his line in the county.”

“The Other Woman”

Next we meet the recently divorced Imelda McKindley, eight years younger than
Thomas and Susan. Imelda and her two sons lived just down Elm Street from the
Bawdens.

We know what happened next: In 1924 Thomas went to Reno for his divorce and
happened to see murderer Alex Kels. In divorce court, Thomas described “extreme
cruelty” that he had suffered during his marriage to Susan. At a time when people
shrugged off domestic violence as nearly normal, the lurid detail of Susan (allegedly)
having slapped Thomas with a beefsteak flew from Reno to Lodi and must have caused
eyerolling and merry gossip intolerable to Susan and the Jahant family.

A few days after the divorce was final, Thomas married Imelda.

Everyone Got What They Deserved

Susan endured the excited whispers stoically, simply telling a Lodi Sentinel reporter that
“Mr. Bawden wanted a divorce and I told him to go get it. His statements are not true.”
She never remarried. Instead, she went on to a fine solo business career as the owner
of Hale & Bawden Funeral Home and Lodi Memorial Cemetery.

Thomas moved with his new wife and stepsons to a rented house in Stockton, where
they stayed for the rest of their lives. Ironically, a few months after the divorce Susan
hired Thomas back as her employee at Hale & Bawden, where he worked for many
years.

Susan’s many contributions to Lodi will be detailed in a later article. But imagine– if
Susan hadn’t (allegedly!) inflicted such suffering upon Thomas, he would not have been
in Reno and Lodi’s dastardly Alex Kels might well have escaped justice.