Dan Melchior grew up hearing the story of Rudolph Ziemer’s death. Learning the full scope decades later changed his life. The Harrison High School graduate knew three paratroopers from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, beat Ziemer — an openly gay man — to death in 1963, then rolled his body and car into the Ohio River. Melchior knew about his family’s connection to Ziemer because he often took his clothes to Melchior’s grandfather’s dry-cleaning business. He didn’t know Ziemer’s assailants got away with their crime “by essentially smearing him and moving the trial to Boonville, where they were assured an all-white, all-male jury,” he says.
“The case divided the city — half the people believed the paratroopers were heroes, and half said you can’t just kill someone. It divided my family, too,” says Melchior, now the director of shared services at San Diego State University in California.
Melchior pieced together information over nearly four years. He workshopped his findings as his thesis for a Master of Arts at Maryland’s Johns Hopkins University. Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library collections director Kate Linderman found newspaper articles about the case. Boonville court reporter Sarah Ellard Stephens discovered the trial was audio recorded; the book contains transcripts.
“In the fabric of society, all these things are connected,” Melchior says.
In “The Silk Finisher: Bigotry, Murder, and Sacrifice in the Crossroads of America,” Melchior lays bare a city’s divided conscience and how Ziemer’s death and the corresponding court case remain culturally relevant.
The experience, he says, was “a journey of discovery for me.”
“I learned things about my family that I never knew,” Melchior says. “That makes you find out things about yourself and understand why things happened the way they did in your family.”
