Murder in Ardnacrusha

The death of a 45-year-old German foreman on the site of the Shannon Scheme is featured as one of the Irish murder cases in the latest issue of the True Detective.

The Irish Free State Government decided to spend one fifth of its entire annual budget on harnessing the hydroelectric power of the River Shannon and on completion in 1929, the outcome at Ardnacrusha was the world’s largest hydroelectric generating station.
The scheme’s workforce camp included accommodation for 750 men and a dining room seating 600. At the peak of the power station’s construction, 5,200 men were employed.
Most of the engineers and skilled workers involved in the £5.2 million development were German, including Jacob Kunz.
Despite repeated warnings, he persisted in keeping his wages and savings on his person, sewing some of the older notes into the lining of his jacket.
In the early evening of December 21, 1928, Kunz was found covered in blood holding his head in his hands beside the Long Pavement station in the village of Parteen.
Despite efforts to take him to the scheme’s first aid station, he broke away and returned to the railway line saying “my monies, my monies”.
Kunz, who later started vomiting blood, was taken to St John’s Hospital in Limerick, where he died shortly afterwards due to a skull fracture and brain laceration.
His attacker had taken about £80 but failed to find the £415 concealed in his clothes, which was given to his brother, Johann, as he had been looking after his savings as well.
John Cox, 31, a worker at the scheme refused to account for this movements between 5 and 7pm that evening when arrested on suspicion of murder and later made a number of conflicting statements about a pub-crawl, where he had been reported buying a round for six men at a local bar, a whisky for himself and had offered to buy one for a complete stranger.
Two days after his arrest, Cox was charged with the murder and on Christmas Eve, police intercepted a letter he had concealed in a parcel for his wife. The note told her where he had hidden Kunz’s missing money.
A search of the ruins of a house at Park Bridge, about two miles from the crime scene, recovered Kunz’s stolen £80 10s and clay found on Cox’s clothes matched that found on a wire fence scaled by the killer as he set out to hide his loot.
Cox tried to blame the murder on Edward Cassidy, a young man who disliked Kunz, but it was quickly established Cassidy had an alibi.
Everyone who knew Kunz described him as a popular and inoffensive, quiet man that was always polite. His slaying made headlines for weeks and it was a packed Dublin Central Criminal Court that heard John Cox deny the German’s murder on March 11, 1929.
The jury found Cox guilty of murder but in a note to the judge they stated they didn’t believe he intended to kill Kunz, who might have survived if his skull was thicker.
His subsequent appeal was dismissed and despite a campaign and a petition for mercy, he was hanged in Mountjoy Prison on April 25, 1929.