Birth Name: Ruth Catherine Steinhagen
Daughter of Walter G. and Edith S. C.(Neumann) Steinhagen
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, the Chicago woman whose near-fatal 1949 shooting of former Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus inspired the book and the movie "The Natural," died with the same anonymity with which she lived for more than half a century.
The shooting, thought to be one of the first-ever stalker crimes, nearly killed Waitkus and temporarily sidetracked his career. The incident also helped draw attention to "baseball Annies" — young, hero-worshiping female groupies who would pursue major league ballplayers, often relentlessly.
Miss Steinhagen underwent nearly three years of psychiatric treatment, then disappeared into near obscurity and never spoke publicly about the Waitkus incident again. She spent much of her final 42 years living in a modest house on Chicago's Northwest Side with her parents and sister.
She died Dec. 29 at a Chicago hospital of a subdural hematoma caused by an accidental fall in her home, a Cook County Medical Examiner spokeswoman said. She was 83.
Her death had gone unreported and was only discovered when the Chicago Tribune was searching death records for another story.
Born Ruth Catherine Steinhagen in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, Miss Steinhagen was the daughter of German immigrants, according to Chicago author John Theodore's 2002 Waitkus biography, "Baseball's Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus."
At some point in her teens, Miss Steinhagen, who had begun using the middle name Ann, became obsessed with Waitkus, who then was a first baseman for the Cubs. After the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies before the 1949 season, her obsession with him intensified.
"Here's a 19-year-old girl, living by herself in a tiny apartment on Lincoln Avenue, in 1949," Theodore said via e-mail. "She builds an Eddie Waitkus shrine in her apartment: photos, newspaper clippings, 50 ticket stubs, scorecards. She knows he's from Boston so she develops a craving for baked beans. . . . He's Lithuanian, so she teaches herself the language and listens to Lithuanian radio programs."
It all came to a head June 14, 1949, when the Phillies were in town to play the Cubs. Miss Steinhagen, then a typist for the Continental Casualty insurance company in Chicago, attended the game that day. After the game, she sent Waitkus an unsigned note summoning him to a 12th-floor room in the now-demolished Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the Phillies were staying. When Waitkus arrived at 11:30 p.m., Miss Steinhagen told Waitkus from behind the door, "I have a surprise for you," and then used a .22 caliber rifle that she had bought at a pawn shop to shoot him just below the heart.
After shooting Waitkus, then 29, Miss Steinhagen called the hotel operator and soon was taken into custody as the baseball player was rushed to a hospital. The bullet had torn through his right lung and lodged in back muscles near his spine, and he underwent two blood transfusions while in critical condition.
Waitkus had six operations before doctors finally removed the bullet.
He made an impressive recovery and helped the "Whiz Kid" Phillies to the National League pennant in 1950. He was a regular for two more seasons and played through 1955. He died in 1972.
Source: The Washington Post, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949,” Friday, March 16, 2013, by Bob Goldsborough
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer
On the night of June 14, 1949, a young woman gave an enormous tip — $5 — to a bellhop at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago to deliver a note to another guest, Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, who were in town to play the Cubs. The two had never met, but she needed to see him, she explained in the note, in which she called herself Ruth Anne Burns. Could he come to her room?
She ordered two whiskey sours and a daiquiri from room service and sipped them while she waited. Waitkus received the note late in the evening and phoned her room about 11 p.m. When she answered, she said she had gone to bed and needed to dress. Would he wait half an hour and then knock on her door?
The woman, a 19-year-old typist for an insurance company whose name was really Ruth Ann Steinhagen, planned to stab Waitkus with a knife when he entered the room, she later said. But after she opened the door, he rushed by her and sat in a chair. So instead, she went to a closet and fetched a .22 caliber rifle she had recently bought.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
Training the gun on him, she forced him to stand up and move toward the window.
“For two years, you’ve been bothering me, and now you’re going to die,” she told Waitkus, according to a front-page account in The New York Times. Then she shot him.
The story was a sensation in the newspapers, and an antecedent of myriad celebrity stalkings in later decades, including the killing of John Lennon and the on-court knife attack on the tennis player Monica Seles.
Hit on the right side of the chest, Waitkus survived, and he returned to baseball the next season. Ms. Steinhagen was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder. But less than three weeks after the shooting, a judge declared her insane and committed her to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent three years. She was not punished further.
Little is known of her later life, except that in 1970, she moved into a small house on the North Side of Chicago with her parents and her sister, all of whom she outlived. It was a reclusive enough existence that when she died, on Dec. 29 at 83, her death went unremarked upon until The Chicago Tribune reported it on March 15.
The newspaper said it had come across a notice of her death while searching public records for another article.
Anthony Brucci, the chief investigator for the Cook County medical examiner’s office in Illinois, said the cause of death was a subdural hematoma sustained in a fall. Ms Steinhagen leaves no immediate survivors.
The encounter in the Edgewater Beach Hotel was seemingly seized upon by Bernard Malamud, who placed a similar event in the opening section of his 1952 novel, “The Natural,” which posited baseball as a fertile source of American mythology. It was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford as the fictional ballplayer Roy Hobbs, whose rise to stardom is interrupted by a seductive woman, played by Barbara Hershey, who lures him to a hotel room and shoots him.
Ruth Catherine Steinhagen was born in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, and graduated from high school in Chicago, according to a 2002 biography of Waitkus, “Baseball’s Natural,” by John Theodore. She adopted the middle name Ann as a girl.
Ms. Steinhagen had a penchant for falling in love with unattainable men. She told the police that before she began focusing on Waitkus, she had had crushes on the movie star Alan Ladd and a Cubs infielder, Peanuts Lowrey. She became obsessed with Waitkus during his three full seasons for the Cubs, collecting photographs of him and talking about him incessantly, her family said after the shooting.
When Waitkus was traded to Philadelphia after the 1948 season, she had a breakdown, her mother told reporters, and moved to a small apartment, where she built what amounted to a shrine to Waitkus. Mr. Theodore wrote that because Waitkus was from the Boston area, she developed a craving for baked beans. Because he was of Lithuanian descent, she studied Lithuanian.
“I had my first good look at him in 1947,” Ms. Steinhagen said of Waitkus in an autobiographical sketch she wrote after the shooting, at the direction of a court-appointed psychiatrist. “I used to go to all the ballgames just to watch him. We used to wait for them to come out of the clubhouse after the game, and all the time I was watching him, I was building in my mind the idea of killing him. As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept thinking, I will never get him, and if I can’t have him, nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I would kill him.”
Her plan was to commit suicide afterward, she told the police, but she did not have the courage to follow through. Instead, she called the hotel operator to say she had just shot a man. She knelt next to Waitkus and held his hand, she said.
The bullet had pierced one of Waitkus’s lungs and lodged in the muscles of his back, injuries that required several operations.
He played six seasons after the shooting, finishing his career with a .285 batting average. In 1950, he played in the World Series for the Phillies, a team nicknamed the Whiz Kids; they lost to the Yankees.
Waitkus, who had served in the Army in the Philippines during World War II, declined to press charges against Ms. Steinhagen when she was released from the hospital, and throughout his ordeal, he spoke about it with a lightheartedness that belied the damage it had caused him.
“Once he realized she was not going to be a threat to him, he wasn’t vengeful or angry,” Edward Waitkus Jr., a lawyer in Boulder, Colo., said about his father in a telephone interview Thursday. “He understood he was a victim based on nothing other than fantasy.
“The only resentment he had was it cost him the 1949 season, and he’d been playing really well. He’d survived three years in the jungles of the Philippines with barely a scratch, and he comes back here and this ‘crazy honey with a gun,’ as he used to say, takes him out.”
Mr. Waitkus said his father suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, possibly from his war experience, but certainly from the shooting as well. He died of esophageal cancer in 1972.
“His nerves were shattered for a while,” Mr. Waitkus said. “The fall from grace as an athlete was difficult for him. And he didn’t really recognize the problems, but they hampered him the rest of his life.”
Source: The New York Times, New York New York, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer,”by Bruce Weber, March 23, 2013
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Victim: Eddie Watikus 1919 - 1972
Daughter of Walter G. and Edith S. C.(Neumann) Steinhagen
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, the Chicago woman whose near-fatal 1949 shooting of former Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus inspired the book and the movie "The Natural," died with the same anonymity with which she lived for more than half a century.
The shooting, thought to be one of the first-ever stalker crimes, nearly killed Waitkus and temporarily sidetracked his career. The incident also helped draw attention to "baseball Annies" — young, hero-worshiping female groupies who would pursue major league ballplayers, often relentlessly.
Miss Steinhagen underwent nearly three years of psychiatric treatment, then disappeared into near obscurity and never spoke publicly about the Waitkus incident again. She spent much of her final 42 years living in a modest house on Chicago's Northwest Side with her parents and sister.
She died Dec. 29 at a Chicago hospital of a subdural hematoma caused by an accidental fall in her home, a Cook County Medical Examiner spokeswoman said. She was 83.
Her death had gone unreported and was only discovered when the Chicago Tribune was searching death records for another story.
Born Ruth Catherine Steinhagen in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, Miss Steinhagen was the daughter of German immigrants, according to Chicago author John Theodore's 2002 Waitkus biography, "Baseball's Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus."
At some point in her teens, Miss Steinhagen, who had begun using the middle name Ann, became obsessed with Waitkus, who then was a first baseman for the Cubs. After the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies before the 1949 season, her obsession with him intensified.
"Here's a 19-year-old girl, living by herself in a tiny apartment on Lincoln Avenue, in 1949," Theodore said via e-mail. "She builds an Eddie Waitkus shrine in her apartment: photos, newspaper clippings, 50 ticket stubs, scorecards. She knows he's from Boston so she develops a craving for baked beans. . . . He's Lithuanian, so she teaches herself the language and listens to Lithuanian radio programs."
It all came to a head June 14, 1949, when the Phillies were in town to play the Cubs. Miss Steinhagen, then a typist for the Continental Casualty insurance company in Chicago, attended the game that day. After the game, she sent Waitkus an unsigned note summoning him to a 12th-floor room in the now-demolished Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the Phillies were staying. When Waitkus arrived at 11:30 p.m., Miss Steinhagen told Waitkus from behind the door, "I have a surprise for you," and then used a .22 caliber rifle that she had bought at a pawn shop to shoot him just below the heart.
After shooting Waitkus, then 29, Miss Steinhagen called the hotel operator and soon was taken into custody as the baseball player was rushed to a hospital. The bullet had torn through his right lung and lodged in back muscles near his spine, and he underwent two blood transfusions while in critical condition.
Waitkus had six operations before doctors finally removed the bullet.
He made an impressive recovery and helped the "Whiz Kid" Phillies to the National League pennant in 1950. He was a regular for two more seasons and played through 1955. He died in 1972.
Source: The Washington Post, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949,” Friday, March 16, 2013, by Bob Goldsborough
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer
On the night of June 14, 1949, a young woman gave an enormous tip — $5 — to a bellhop at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago to deliver a note to another guest, Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, who were in town to play the Cubs. The two had never met, but she needed to see him, she explained in the note, in which she called herself Ruth Anne Burns. Could he come to her room?
She ordered two whiskey sours and a daiquiri from room service and sipped them while she waited. Waitkus received the note late in the evening and phoned her room about 11 p.m. When she answered, she said she had gone to bed and needed to dress. Would he wait half an hour and then knock on her door?
The woman, a 19-year-old typist for an insurance company whose name was really Ruth Ann Steinhagen, planned to stab Waitkus with a knife when he entered the room, she later said. But after she opened the door, he rushed by her and sat in a chair. So instead, she went to a closet and fetched a .22 caliber rifle she had recently bought.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
Training the gun on him, she forced him to stand up and move toward the window.
“For two years, you’ve been bothering me, and now you’re going to die,” she told Waitkus, according to a front-page account in The New York Times. Then she shot him.
The story was a sensation in the newspapers, and an antecedent of myriad celebrity stalkings in later decades, including the killing of John Lennon and the on-court knife attack on the tennis player Monica Seles.
Hit on the right side of the chest, Waitkus survived, and he returned to baseball the next season. Ms. Steinhagen was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder. But less than three weeks after the shooting, a judge declared her insane and committed her to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent three years. She was not punished further.
Little is known of her later life, except that in 1970, she moved into a small house on the North Side of Chicago with her parents and her sister, all of whom she outlived. It was a reclusive enough existence that when she died, on Dec. 29 at 83, her death went unremarked upon until The Chicago Tribune reported it on March 15.
The newspaper said it had come across a notice of her death while searching public records for another article.
Anthony Brucci, the chief investigator for the Cook County medical examiner’s office in Illinois, said the cause of death was a subdural hematoma sustained in a fall. Ms Steinhagen leaves no immediate survivors.
The encounter in the Edgewater Beach Hotel was seemingly seized upon by Bernard Malamud, who placed a similar event in the opening section of his 1952 novel, “The Natural,” which posited baseball as a fertile source of American mythology. It was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford as the fictional ballplayer Roy Hobbs, whose rise to stardom is interrupted by a seductive woman, played by Barbara Hershey, who lures him to a hotel room and shoots him.
Ruth Catherine Steinhagen was born in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, and graduated from high school in Chicago, according to a 2002 biography of Waitkus, “Baseball’s Natural,” by John Theodore. She adopted the middle name Ann as a girl.
Ms. Steinhagen had a penchant for falling in love with unattainable men. She told the police that before she began focusing on Waitkus, she had had crushes on the movie star Alan Ladd and a Cubs infielder, Peanuts Lowrey. She became obsessed with Waitkus during his three full seasons for the Cubs, collecting photographs of him and talking about him incessantly, her family said after the shooting.
When Waitkus was traded to Philadelphia after the 1948 season, she had a breakdown, her mother told reporters, and moved to a small apartment, where she built what amounted to a shrine to Waitkus. Mr. Theodore wrote that because Waitkus was from the Boston area, she developed a craving for baked beans. Because he was of Lithuanian descent, she studied Lithuanian.
“I had my first good look at him in 1947,” Ms. Steinhagen said of Waitkus in an autobiographical sketch she wrote after the shooting, at the direction of a court-appointed psychiatrist. “I used to go to all the ballgames just to watch him. We used to wait for them to come out of the clubhouse after the game, and all the time I was watching him, I was building in my mind the idea of killing him. As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept thinking, I will never get him, and if I can’t have him, nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I would kill him.”
Her plan was to commit suicide afterward, she told the police, but she did not have the courage to follow through. Instead, she called the hotel operator to say she had just shot a man. She knelt next to Waitkus and held his hand, she said.
The bullet had pierced one of Waitkus’s lungs and lodged in the muscles of his back, injuries that required several operations.
He played six seasons after the shooting, finishing his career with a .285 batting average. In 1950, he played in the World Series for the Phillies, a team nicknamed the Whiz Kids; they lost to the Yankees.
Waitkus, who had served in the Army in the Philippines during World War II, declined to press charges against Ms. Steinhagen when she was released from the hospital, and throughout his ordeal, he spoke about it with a lightheartedness that belied the damage it had caused him.
“Once he realized she was not going to be a threat to him, he wasn’t vengeful or angry,” Edward Waitkus Jr., a lawyer in Boulder, Colo., said about his father in a telephone interview Thursday. “He understood he was a victim based on nothing other than fantasy.
“The only resentment he had was it cost him the 1949 season, and he’d been playing really well. He’d survived three years in the jungles of the Philippines with barely a scratch, and he comes back here and this ‘crazy honey with a gun,’ as he used to say, takes him out.”
Mr. Waitkus said his father suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, possibly from his war experience, but certainly from the shooting as well. He died of esophageal cancer in 1972.
“His nerves were shattered for a while,” Mr. Waitkus said. “The fall from grace as an athlete was difficult for him. And he didn’t really recognize the problems, but they hampered him the rest of his life.”
Source: The New York Times, New York New York, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer,”by Bruce Weber, March 23, 2013
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Victim: Eddie Watikus 1919 - 1972
Birth Name: Ruth Catherine Steinhagen
Daughter of Walter G. and Edith S. C.(Neumann) Steinhagen
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, the Chicago woman whose near-fatal 1949 shooting of former Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus inspired the book and the movie "The Natural," died with the same anonymity with which she lived for more than half a century.
The shooting, thought to be one of the first-ever stalker crimes, nearly killed Waitkus and temporarily sidetracked his career. The incident also helped draw attention to "baseball Annies" — young, hero-worshiping female groupies who would pursue major league ballplayers, often relentlessly.
Miss Steinhagen underwent nearly three years of psychiatric treatment, then disappeared into near obscurity and never spoke publicly about the Waitkus incident again. She spent much of her final 42 years living in a modest house on Chicago's Northwest Side with her parents and sister.
She died Dec. 29 at a Chicago hospital of a subdural hematoma caused by an accidental fall in her home, a Cook County Medical Examiner spokeswoman said. She was 83.
Her death had gone unreported and was only discovered when the Chicago Tribune was searching death records for another story.
Born Ruth Catherine Steinhagen in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, Miss Steinhagen was the daughter of German immigrants, according to Chicago author John Theodore's 2002 Waitkus biography, "Baseball's Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus."
At some point in her teens, Miss Steinhagen, who had begun using the middle name Ann, became obsessed with Waitkus, who then was a first baseman for the Cubs. After the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies before the 1949 season, her obsession with him intensified.
"Here's a 19-year-old girl, living by herself in a tiny apartment on Lincoln Avenue, in 1949," Theodore said via e-mail. "She builds an Eddie Waitkus shrine in her apartment: photos, newspaper clippings, 50 ticket stubs, scorecards. She knows he's from Boston so she develops a craving for baked beans. . . . He's Lithuanian, so she teaches herself the language and listens to Lithuanian radio programs."
It all came to a head June 14, 1949, when the Phillies were in town to play the Cubs. Miss Steinhagen, then a typist for the Continental Casualty insurance company in Chicago, attended the game that day. After the game, she sent Waitkus an unsigned note summoning him to a 12th-floor room in the now-demolished Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the Phillies were staying. When Waitkus arrived at 11:30 p.m., Miss Steinhagen told Waitkus from behind the door, "I have a surprise for you," and then used a .22 caliber rifle that she had bought at a pawn shop to shoot him just below the heart.
After shooting Waitkus, then 29, Miss Steinhagen called the hotel operator and soon was taken into custody as the baseball player was rushed to a hospital. The bullet had torn through his right lung and lodged in back muscles near his spine, and he underwent two blood transfusions while in critical condition.
Waitkus had six operations before doctors finally removed the bullet.
He made an impressive recovery and helped the "Whiz Kid" Phillies to the National League pennant in 1950. He was a regular for two more seasons and played through 1955. He died in 1972.
Source: The Washington Post, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949,” Friday, March 16, 2013, by Bob Goldsborough
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer
On the night of June 14, 1949, a young woman gave an enormous tip — $5 — to a bellhop at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago to deliver a note to another guest, Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, who were in town to play the Cubs. The two had never met, but she needed to see him, she explained in the note, in which she called herself Ruth Anne Burns. Could he come to her room?
She ordered two whiskey sours and a daiquiri from room service and sipped them while she waited. Waitkus received the note late in the evening and phoned her room about 11 p.m. When she answered, she said she had gone to bed and needed to dress. Would he wait half an hour and then knock on her door?
The woman, a 19-year-old typist for an insurance company whose name was really Ruth Ann Steinhagen, planned to stab Waitkus with a knife when he entered the room, she later said. But after she opened the door, he rushed by her and sat in a chair. So instead, she went to a closet and fetched a .22 caliber rifle she had recently bought.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
Training the gun on him, she forced him to stand up and move toward the window.
“For two years, you’ve been bothering me, and now you’re going to die,” she told Waitkus, according to a front-page account in The New York Times. Then she shot him.
The story was a sensation in the newspapers, and an antecedent of myriad celebrity stalkings in later decades, including the killing of John Lennon and the on-court knife attack on the tennis player Monica Seles.
Hit on the right side of the chest, Waitkus survived, and he returned to baseball the next season. Ms. Steinhagen was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder. But less than three weeks after the shooting, a judge declared her insane and committed her to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent three years. She was not punished further.
Little is known of her later life, except that in 1970, she moved into a small house on the North Side of Chicago with her parents and her sister, all of whom she outlived. It was a reclusive enough existence that when she died, on Dec. 29 at 83, her death went unremarked upon until The Chicago Tribune reported it on March 15.
The newspaper said it had come across a notice of her death while searching public records for another article.
Anthony Brucci, the chief investigator for the Cook County medical examiner’s office in Illinois, said the cause of death was a subdural hematoma sustained in a fall. Ms Steinhagen leaves no immediate survivors.
The encounter in the Edgewater Beach Hotel was seemingly seized upon by Bernard Malamud, who placed a similar event in the opening section of his 1952 novel, “The Natural,” which posited baseball as a fertile source of American mythology. It was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford as the fictional ballplayer Roy Hobbs, whose rise to stardom is interrupted by a seductive woman, played by Barbara Hershey, who lures him to a hotel room and shoots him.
Ruth Catherine Steinhagen was born in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, and graduated from high school in Chicago, according to a 2002 biography of Waitkus, “Baseball’s Natural,” by John Theodore. She adopted the middle name Ann as a girl.
Ms. Steinhagen had a penchant for falling in love with unattainable men. She told the police that before she began focusing on Waitkus, she had had crushes on the movie star Alan Ladd and a Cubs infielder, Peanuts Lowrey. She became obsessed with Waitkus during his three full seasons for the Cubs, collecting photographs of him and talking about him incessantly, her family said after the shooting.
When Waitkus was traded to Philadelphia after the 1948 season, she had a breakdown, her mother told reporters, and moved to a small apartment, where she built what amounted to a shrine to Waitkus. Mr. Theodore wrote that because Waitkus was from the Boston area, she developed a craving for baked beans. Because he was of Lithuanian descent, she studied Lithuanian.
“I had my first good look at him in 1947,” Ms. Steinhagen said of Waitkus in an autobiographical sketch she wrote after the shooting, at the direction of a court-appointed psychiatrist. “I used to go to all the ballgames just to watch him. We used to wait for them to come out of the clubhouse after the game, and all the time I was watching him, I was building in my mind the idea of killing him. As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept thinking, I will never get him, and if I can’t have him, nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I would kill him.”
Her plan was to commit suicide afterward, she told the police, but she did not have the courage to follow through. Instead, she called the hotel operator to say she had just shot a man. She knelt next to Waitkus and held his hand, she said.
The bullet had pierced one of Waitkus’s lungs and lodged in the muscles of his back, injuries that required several operations.
He played six seasons after the shooting, finishing his career with a .285 batting average. In 1950, he played in the World Series for the Phillies, a team nicknamed the Whiz Kids; they lost to the Yankees.
Waitkus, who had served in the Army in the Philippines during World War II, declined to press charges against Ms. Steinhagen when she was released from the hospital, and throughout his ordeal, he spoke about it with a lightheartedness that belied the damage it had caused him.
“Once he realized she was not going to be a threat to him, he wasn’t vengeful or angry,” Edward Waitkus Jr., a lawyer in Boulder, Colo., said about his father in a telephone interview Thursday. “He understood he was a victim based on nothing other than fantasy.
“The only resentment he had was it cost him the 1949 season, and he’d been playing really well. He’d survived three years in the jungles of the Philippines with barely a scratch, and he comes back here and this ‘crazy honey with a gun,’ as he used to say, takes him out.”
Mr. Waitkus said his father suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, possibly from his war experience, but certainly from the shooting as well. He died of esophageal cancer in 1972.
“His nerves were shattered for a while,” Mr. Waitkus said. “The fall from grace as an athlete was difficult for him. And he didn’t really recognize the problems, but they hampered him the rest of his life.”
Source: The New York Times, New York New York, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer,”by Bruce Weber, March 23, 2013
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Victim: Eddie Watikus 1919 - 1972
Daughter of Walter G. and Edith S. C.(Neumann) Steinhagen
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949
Ruth Ann Steinhagen, the Chicago woman whose near-fatal 1949 shooting of former Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus inspired the book and the movie "The Natural," died with the same anonymity with which she lived for more than half a century.
The shooting, thought to be one of the first-ever stalker crimes, nearly killed Waitkus and temporarily sidetracked his career. The incident also helped draw attention to "baseball Annies" — young, hero-worshiping female groupies who would pursue major league ballplayers, often relentlessly.
Miss Steinhagen underwent nearly three years of psychiatric treatment, then disappeared into near obscurity and never spoke publicly about the Waitkus incident again. She spent much of her final 42 years living in a modest house on Chicago's Northwest Side with her parents and sister.
She died Dec. 29 at a Chicago hospital of a subdural hematoma caused by an accidental fall in her home, a Cook County Medical Examiner spokeswoman said. She was 83.
Her death had gone unreported and was only discovered when the Chicago Tribune was searching death records for another story.
Born Ruth Catherine Steinhagen in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, Miss Steinhagen was the daughter of German immigrants, according to Chicago author John Theodore's 2002 Waitkus biography, "Baseball's Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus."
At some point in her teens, Miss Steinhagen, who had begun using the middle name Ann, became obsessed with Waitkus, who then was a first baseman for the Cubs. After the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies before the 1949 season, her obsession with him intensified.
"Here's a 19-year-old girl, living by herself in a tiny apartment on Lincoln Avenue, in 1949," Theodore said via e-mail. "She builds an Eddie Waitkus shrine in her apartment: photos, newspaper clippings, 50 ticket stubs, scorecards. She knows he's from Boston so she develops a craving for baked beans. . . . He's Lithuanian, so she teaches herself the language and listens to Lithuanian radio programs."
It all came to a head June 14, 1949, when the Phillies were in town to play the Cubs. Miss Steinhagen, then a typist for the Continental Casualty insurance company in Chicago, attended the game that day. After the game, she sent Waitkus an unsigned note summoning him to a 12th-floor room in the now-demolished Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the Phillies were staying. When Waitkus arrived at 11:30 p.m., Miss Steinhagen told Waitkus from behind the door, "I have a surprise for you," and then used a .22 caliber rifle that she had bought at a pawn shop to shoot him just below the heart.
After shooting Waitkus, then 29, Miss Steinhagen called the hotel operator and soon was taken into custody as the baseball player was rushed to a hospital. The bullet had torn through his right lung and lodged in back muscles near his spine, and he underwent two blood transfusions while in critical condition.
Waitkus had six operations before doctors finally removed the bullet.
He made an impressive recovery and helped the "Whiz Kid" Phillies to the National League pennant in 1950. He was a regular for two more seasons and played through 1955. He died in 1972.
Source: The Washington Post, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, dies; was infamous for shooting ballplayer in 1949,” Friday, March 16, 2013, by Bob Goldsborough
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Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer
On the night of June 14, 1949, a young woman gave an enormous tip — $5 — to a bellhop at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago to deliver a note to another guest, Eddie Waitkus, the first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, who were in town to play the Cubs. The two had never met, but she needed to see him, she explained in the note, in which she called herself Ruth Anne Burns. Could he come to her room?
She ordered two whiskey sours and a daiquiri from room service and sipped them while she waited. Waitkus received the note late in the evening and phoned her room about 11 p.m. When she answered, she said she had gone to bed and needed to dress. Would he wait half an hour and then knock on her door?
The woman, a 19-year-old typist for an insurance company whose name was really Ruth Ann Steinhagen, planned to stab Waitkus with a knife when he entered the room, she later said. But after she opened the door, he rushed by her and sat in a chair. So instead, she went to a closet and fetched a .22 caliber rifle she had recently bought.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
Training the gun on him, she forced him to stand up and move toward the window.
“For two years, you’ve been bothering me, and now you’re going to die,” she told Waitkus, according to a front-page account in The New York Times. Then she shot him.
The story was a sensation in the newspapers, and an antecedent of myriad celebrity stalkings in later decades, including the killing of John Lennon and the on-court knife attack on the tennis player Monica Seles.
Hit on the right side of the chest, Waitkus survived, and he returned to baseball the next season. Ms. Steinhagen was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder. But less than three weeks after the shooting, a judge declared her insane and committed her to a psychiatric hospital, where she spent three years. She was not punished further.
Little is known of her later life, except that in 1970, she moved into a small house on the North Side of Chicago with her parents and her sister, all of whom she outlived. It was a reclusive enough existence that when she died, on Dec. 29 at 83, her death went unremarked upon until The Chicago Tribune reported it on March 15.
The newspaper said it had come across a notice of her death while searching public records for another article.
Anthony Brucci, the chief investigator for the Cook County medical examiner’s office in Illinois, said the cause of death was a subdural hematoma sustained in a fall. Ms Steinhagen leaves no immediate survivors.
The encounter in the Edgewater Beach Hotel was seemingly seized upon by Bernard Malamud, who placed a similar event in the opening section of his 1952 novel, “The Natural,” which posited baseball as a fertile source of American mythology. It was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford as the fictional ballplayer Roy Hobbs, whose rise to stardom is interrupted by a seductive woman, played by Barbara Hershey, who lures him to a hotel room and shoots him.
Ruth Catherine Steinhagen was born in Cicero, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1929, and graduated from high school in Chicago, according to a 2002 biography of Waitkus, “Baseball’s Natural,” by John Theodore. She adopted the middle name Ann as a girl.
Ms. Steinhagen had a penchant for falling in love with unattainable men. She told the police that before she began focusing on Waitkus, she had had crushes on the movie star Alan Ladd and a Cubs infielder, Peanuts Lowrey. She became obsessed with Waitkus during his three full seasons for the Cubs, collecting photographs of him and talking about him incessantly, her family said after the shooting.
When Waitkus was traded to Philadelphia after the 1948 season, she had a breakdown, her mother told reporters, and moved to a small apartment, where she built what amounted to a shrine to Waitkus. Mr. Theodore wrote that because Waitkus was from the Boston area, she developed a craving for baked beans. Because he was of Lithuanian descent, she studied Lithuanian.
“I had my first good look at him in 1947,” Ms. Steinhagen said of Waitkus in an autobiographical sketch she wrote after the shooting, at the direction of a court-appointed psychiatrist. “I used to go to all the ballgames just to watch him. We used to wait for them to come out of the clubhouse after the game, and all the time I was watching him, I was building in my mind the idea of killing him. As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept thinking, I will never get him, and if I can’t have him, nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew I would kill him.”
Her plan was to commit suicide afterward, she told the police, but she did not have the courage to follow through. Instead, she called the hotel operator to say she had just shot a man. She knelt next to Waitkus and held his hand, she said.
The bullet had pierced one of Waitkus’s lungs and lodged in the muscles of his back, injuries that required several operations.
He played six seasons after the shooting, finishing his career with a .285 batting average. In 1950, he played in the World Series for the Phillies, a team nicknamed the Whiz Kids; they lost to the Yankees.
Waitkus, who had served in the Army in the Philippines during World War II, declined to press charges against Ms. Steinhagen when she was released from the hospital, and throughout his ordeal, he spoke about it with a lightheartedness that belied the damage it had caused him.
“Once he realized she was not going to be a threat to him, he wasn’t vengeful or angry,” Edward Waitkus Jr., a lawyer in Boulder, Colo., said about his father in a telephone interview Thursday. “He understood he was a victim based on nothing other than fantasy.
“The only resentment he had was it cost him the 1949 season, and he’d been playing really well. He’d survived three years in the jungles of the Philippines with barely a scratch, and he comes back here and this ‘crazy honey with a gun,’ as he used to say, takes him out.”
Mr. Waitkus said his father suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, possibly from his war experience, but certainly from the shooting as well. He died of esophageal cancer in 1972.
“His nerves were shattered for a while,” Mr. Waitkus said. “The fall from grace as an athlete was difficult for him. And he didn’t really recognize the problems, but they hampered him the rest of his life.”
Source: The New York Times, New York New York, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer,”by Bruce Weber, March 23, 2013
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Victim: Eddie Watikus 1919 - 1972
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