Was Anna Schrader the victim of ‘torso murder’?

By Finn J.D. John
May 11, 2025

JUST BEFORE SUNSET on the evening of April 12, 1946, Milwaukie residents James and Mary Rader were strolling with their friend H.C. Foster along the river by the Wisdom Island Moorage in Oak Grove when they saw a strange parcel swirling in an eddy under the dock.

The parcel was about the size of a suitcase, wrapped in burlap and tied up with ropes and wires. It looked like it could be something important — or not. Foster thought not; he said it was probably “a bag of drowned cats” and best left alone, but he got a stick and hooked it and dragged it to the shore for curiosity’s sake.

It was carefully wrapped, that was for sure. And it was a solid object, about 30 inches long and 16 inches wide and less than a foot thick. The three of them untied it and started unwrapping the layers of burlap.

They peeled off the burlap, then a grayish-black tweed topcoat, followed by a long pair of “union-suit” underwear, a dark blue sweater, and a pair of brown slacks.

The slacks were the inmost layer. When those were removed, the three of them found themselves looking down at a naked female torso — headless, armless, legless.

THE NEXT DAY, news of the grisly find was on the front page of the Portland Morning Oregonian, under the headline, “River Eddy Yields Sack with Torso: Mutilated Body of Girl Found Near Milwaukie Dock.”

A fisherman from Oregon City saw the story, and remembered something funny he’d seen several weeks earlier floating in the river near Willamette Locks, above the falls. He hurried to the river, launched his boat, and returned to the scene. Sure enough — there it still was … a leg, and two arms, with the hands and foot chopped off.

Over the following months, most of the rest of the woman’s body was found: the other leg in July, under the Oregon City-Gladstone bridge; and the head in October. (The hands and feet were never found.)

The head was different — it had clearly been the murderer’s plan for the torso and limbs to be found, but not the head. It was weighted down with 21 pounds of iron window-sash weights.

It was found by Mr. and Mrs. Roy Clutter of Oak Grove, as they were walking along the river at the foot of Courtney Street. The river level was very low; apparently the killer had gone to the foot of Courtney Street and pitched the package with the head and sash weights as far as he could out into the river. But that had been in March when the water was running high, and over the course of the summer and fall the river levels had fallen far enough to expose the package.

The head had been in the water half a year, and was missing both eyes and was badly decomposed. She had a partial palate (set of dentures) in her mouth, and long brown hair liberally streaked with gray still done up neatly in a bun.

By the time it was found, the case was already cold. And it didn’t help much, other than to eliminate a few possible matches from the missing-persons file who didn’t wear dentures or have brown-and-gray hair. To this day, the case remains unsolved.

The discoveries, of course, made nationwide headlines, and tips poured in from members of the public — although that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. When the torso was found, authorities thought it was a teenager or woman in her early 20s. That, of course, is a prime age for people to get in trouble or run away, so there were lots of missing girls and women — most missing temporarily, a few permanently — whose worried families reached out.

By the time the head was found, police had figured out that the body was that of an older woman — late 40s or early 50s. But the initial rush of leads was all missing girls and young women, and of course those investigations went nowhere as regarded the torso murder.

Meanwhile, unnoticed by everyone, a run of three small classified advertisements, spaced nine days apart, appeared in the Morning Oregonian. The last of these ran on April 19, a week after the torso was found.

“Anyone who knows the whereabouts of Ann(a) Schrader please write N472 Oregonian,” it read.

ANNA TIERNEY SCHRADER came to Oregon in 1910, at the height of what later became known as Portland’s “Girl Rush.” The Girl Rush was a sharp spike in the number of single women who moved to Portland after learning that there were five single gents for every single lady in Stumptown — sort of a reverse of the “two girls for every boy” situation Jan and Dean sang about in “Surf City.”

(“Girl Rush,” by the way, is a reference to the 1944 movie of the same name, in which a Gold Rush-era mining town, stocked exclusively with men, offers a Vaudeville troupe gold if they’ll move to town and bring some ladies with them. The title is a play on “Gold Rush,” of course. It’s not to be confused with “The Girl Rush,” a 1955 Rosalind Russell musical about rival Las Vegas casino owners.)

In 1910 when she arrived, Anna was not single, but she clearly wanted to be, and before too long she was. She’d been born, raised, and married in Montana. The marriage had happened at a very early age, and reading between the lines it appears she came to Portland to get away from it.

Once in Portland, she took a room in a North Portland boardinghouse and started getting settled in. Young and pretty and vivacious in a town that still had far more eligible men than women, she had no trouble filling up her social calendar, and she was quite a social butterfly.

She soon found a sweetheart in Edward Schrader, a fellow resident in the boardinghouse she lived in. In 1915 they were married and set up housekeeping together in Southeast Portland.

Edward was, by all accounts, a real brick, to use the slang of the day — solid, good-natured, and dependable. He had a steady, well-paying job at the railroad yard. He worked nights, so Anna was left to her own devices in the evenings.

As a respectable married woman, Anna got settled in right away. She got active in her political party, joined the Portland Women’s Club, and the following year ran for Rose Festival Queen.

That same year, she accepted a bet on the outcome of a political election — probably betting on Charles Evans Hughes to beat Woodrow Wilson for President. When she lost the wager, she took her medicine like a good sport — which wasn’t easy; the terms of the bet were that the loser had to do that year’s Christmas Day Polar Bear Club swim in the Willamette River.

It worked out great for her, though. She was the only swimmer brave enough to get in the freezing water that year, and she looked fantastic in a swimsuit — so the feat got her plenty of positive attention.

Also in 1916, Anna met a dashing young Portland Police Department officer named William (Bill) Breuning. The two of them became great friends, and he introduced her around the police department, and pretty soon the vivacious little groupie was practically a police-department mascot.

And somewhere along the way, she and Bill became more than just  friends. Later, when it all came crashing down, she’d be quoted in the newspaper saying their affair started in 1921 and, well, maybe it did.

“Eight years ago he used to call for me and ask me out to dinner and everywhere,” she testified, according to J.D. Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy’s book, Murder and Scandal in Prohibition Portland (quoting from a Morning Oregonian article). “Since then he has hardly missed a night at my house. I know that I have done wrong. He was so nice to me in those early days, saying that he loved me, that I became infatuated with him. Many times he has taken his wife to a show and has come to see me. For weeks at a time he has eaten his evening meals at my house. In all that time my husband, whom I consider the best man I have ever known, did not know anything about it, for he was working.”

By 1921, Bill was an up-and-coming lieutenant in the force, and had become more or less the face of Prohibition enforcement by the department — which, by the way, was itself doing quite a bit of illegal liquor distributing at the time. Bill helped Anna get set up as a sort of Prohibition Mata Hari — her title was “Private Detective” — and sent her to infiltrate speakeasies and blind pigs that had not had the good sense to get “fixed” with the police department before starting into the business. She also, in the same year, joined the “Mayor’s secret police,” the paramilitary right-wing goon squad maintained by Mayor George Baker, mostly for union-busting purposes.

It was an exciting life, and for Anna the twenties really did roar. But it all came to an explosive, scandalous, and very public end in the spring and summer of 1929.

IT ALL BLEW up — or started to — in April of that year, when someone got Bill Breuning’s wife, Blanche, on the phone and told her that her husband was running around on her with some other dame. Actually, the tipster may have been Anna — Blanche later said she recognized her voice. And, of course, the fact that Edward Schrader had not gotten a similar tip-off call suggests she might have been right.

If it was Anna, and she was hoping to force Bill to dump his wife and make her official, the play backfired badly. Breuning promptly dropped her — as much as he could, given that she was always around the police station — and confessed his part in the affair to Police Chief Leon Jenkins. The cat was now out of the bag.

The smart play, as Jenkins was not slow in pointing out to both parties, was for both ex-lovers to slink back to their respective spouses with their tails between their legs and try to get on with their lives as quietly as possible. The resulting flurry of rumors would probably damage Anna’s social life severely, but she would get over it; they were, after all, only rumors at that point. And as for Bill, well, this was an era in which lots of men dallied with mistresses, sometimes even openly.

Interestingly enough, Anna’s rock-steady husband was OK with resolving it that way. Although obviously not happy to have been cheated on, he forgave his wife and accepted her promise to mend her ways.

But Blanche Breuning’s blood was up, and she wanted the Other Woman out of her husband’s life entirely. So she marched her straying hubby into Chief Jenkins’ office for a super-awkward three-way conversation — apparently with an eye toward getting Anna dropped from all association with the Portland Police Department.

Word of this secret powwow got to Anna, and she was enraged by it. She started openly trash-talking Bill around the office, and he responded in kind. It all turned into a really divisive issue at the police department, as their feud boiled out more and more into the open and the other cops started taking sides. Bill’s friends even started pulling stunts like raiding love-nest hotels to steal the guest registers so that Anna’s claims of furtive hot-sheet visits couldn’t be confirmed. (Bill continued doggedly denying, in public at least, there had been any affair.)

Several more tempestuous scenes ensued between Anna and Bill, including one in which (she later said) he got physically abusive with her.

So for the next little chat with her ex-side piece, Anna brought along her “sidearm piece” — a snub-nosed .38 Special. She claimed she had no idea of shooting him with it, but she wanted to use it to encourage him to be more civil.

And that set the stage for the very public events of Aug. 23, when Anna went to Bill’s house to confront him. She arrived at about the same time he did, and as he pulled up in his car, Anna pulled the .38 out and rushed at him.

Bill hit the gas and popped his door open so that the door frame hit her gun hand. The gun went off, but the bullet went wild. Then Bill jumped out, struggled with her for the gun — another wild shot — and then he got the piece away from her and held her at gunpoint with it while some of the bystanders went to call police.

So Anna Schrader went to jail. And when the newspaper reporters came to get her story, she told them everything.

This, of course, was a disaster for everyone involved. Bill Breuning maintained that it was all lies, and that he had never been intimate with Anna Schrader; but nobody believed him. Anna was, of course, expelled forthwith from the Portland Women’s Club and declared persona non grata at the police station. And, of course, she was also expelled from the ranks of the Mayor’s secret police.

But Anna wasn’t ready to give up. Promptly she sued the Portland Police for false arrest, and Edward sued Bill Breuning for “alienation of affection.” She got very outspoken in public criticism of the police department, feeling betrayed by both Chief Jenkins and Mayor Baker. She claimed she had a “little black book” full of incriminating evidence that could take down some very highly placed people in the city government in general, and the police department in particular. She became an absolute gadfly.

The cops — or somebody in sympathy with them — didn’t take this easily. Shortly after her lawsuit was filed, someone put a pistol bullet through her front window; several times bricks were thrown through windows at her house, and her car was soon battered and dented from numerous hit-and-run accidents that the cops declined to investigate. Her car also became a magnet for parking tickets.

It was pretty clear a message was being sent. And it was equally clear that that message was inspiring her to fight back even harder.

When a petition to recall Mayor Baker was launched, she joined the committee and worked very hard to get him fired, making public speeches and radio broadcasts and generally pouring her very considerable energies into making life as hard as possible for the mayor and police chief … and metaphorically waving that little black book around every chance she got.

Until, one day, she stopped, and just went radio-silent (literally as well as figuratively). Sometime in 1932, she just went home, and pretty much stayed there quietly for the rest of her life.

“The question of why she never revealed the secrets she claimed to have is the great mystery of her life, and of the Baker administration,” Chandler and Kennedy write. “At this date, we’ll never know.”

We can speculate, though. Could she have been bought off? It’s possible, although from what we know of her it would have taken a pretty impressive wad of dough to convince her to stop fighting. Could she have been threatened with something? We know very little about her history in Montana; maybe there was something early in her life that she was running from, something they could hold over her. But then, reputations don’t get much more trashed than hers already was at that point!

It's hard to say. But something must have happened. Because she just stopped, and vanished from the public eye. She lived a quiet life in her Southeast Portland house. Edward Schrader died in 1941, and she remained in the home as a widow.

As for Breuning, the whole thing ended very badly for him. The public scandal put so much heat on the police department that Chief Jenkins decided he needed to make an example of him, and fired him for “conduct unbecoming a police officer.” His formerly promising law-enforcement career ended on the spot, leaving him scrambling to find a way to support his wife and children as the Great Depression started unfolding around him. He ended up going bankrupt and losing the family home to foreclosure, a disaster for which he clearly blamed Anna Schrader.

And that’s basically all there was to the story — until 1946, when some very interesting things happened.

First, Leon Jenkins was brought back into office as chief of police. He’d been out of the office since 1933, when Mayor Joseph Carson, newly elected to replace George Baker, appointed Burton Lawson to the job.

Then, on April 5, those mysterious classified ads started.

And, of course, two weeks later, that torso was found at Wisdom Island Moorage. The torso was a close match to Anna Schrader in measurements. The head, when it was found, had hair of a similar color and style, and like Anna, wore dentures. The body parts were a woman in her late 40s or early 50s; Anna Schrader would have been 54 years old in early 1946.

The Oregon State Police worked diligently for a good 10 years to try and figure out who the Torso Murder victim was. They examined the cases of dozens of vanished women from all over the Northwest. But for some reason, they never looked into Anna Schrader.

Chandler and Kennedy, having researched the case extensively, put forward this theory — which they freely acknowledge is far from provable, but which they consider pretty likely, and I think they are right about that:

Early in 1946, Anna Schrader hears Leon Jenkins will soon be back in office as police chief. The news brings back all her old resentment of how he handled her feud with Bill Breuning — she had thought of him as a father-figure type before the “betrayal.” So she comes out of obscurity again with the “little black book” she used to talk about so much.

Someone hears about this — someone whose interests Anna’s black book could threaten. That could be a police official, or it could be one of several organized-crime characters that were active at that time — someone like Al Winter or “Big Jim” Elkins.

Whoever it is decides he needs to shut her up, and for some reason, thinks it’s important to do so in a fairly spectacular way. So he smashes her skull in with something heavy and blunt, cuts her up, and arranges for her torso to float and her head to sink. (Clearly, the head was never intended to be found; just the torso and legs.)

As a message, if it was intended as such, it surely worked pretty well. Who it was intended for is another of the great mysteries of this case.

It's a good theory. It fits the available information very well. But, of course, we’ll never really know.

(Sources: Murder and Scandal in Prohibition Portland, a book by J.D. Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy published in 1916 by The History Press; “The Wisdom Light Murder,” an article by J.B. Fisher published Feb. 28, 2017, on J.D. Chandler’s blog, The Slabtown Chronicle; Portland Morning Oregonian archives from April, August, and October 1946)