- Thread starter
- #1
MrMet
Well-known member
Eddie Waitkus played first base for the Chicago Cubs in the late 1940s. While Waitkus was with the Cubs, a teenage girl named Ruth Ann Steinhagen became infatuated with him. She even kept a shrine to him at the foot of her bed. Then when Waitkus was traded to Philadelphia after the 1948 season, Steinhagen became disconsolate. She decided that if she couldn't have him, no one would. During a road trip to Chicago, Steinhagen somehow arranged for a meeting in a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Steinhagen told him that she had a surprise for him, pulled a rifle from the closet and shot him in the chest. Instead of finishing him off and the killing herself, as planned, she briefly held him and then called the front desk. Waitkus recovered and helped the Philadelphia Whiz Kids win the pennant in 1950. Steinhagen spent three years in a mental hospital.
