Death aboard the Seeandbee

Back in 1885 Morris A. Bradley established the Cleveland and Buffalo Transit Company (C&B). The company operated a popular steamship line from Cleveland, running passenger and freight service to Buffalo, NY aboard the liners State of Ohio and State of New York. With business booming, C&B added to its fleet, christening the City of Buffalo and eventually replacing the aging State of Ohio with the City of Erie which provided night service between Cleveland and Toledo.

C&B saw an opportunity in moving passengers and in the same year as the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage, the Seeandbee joined the fleet and began making regular trips between Cleveland and Buffalo. In her day the Seeandbee held the title of largest and mostly costly liner on the Great Lakes. She was 485 feet from stem to stern and could accommodate 1,500 passengers with 510 staterooms and parlors over four decks. She had an elegant ballroom in which passengers could partake of music and dancing while making the crossing.

The Seeandbee operated from 1913 to 1938, maintain her reputation as the lakes as its most famous liner until, like so many Americans, she was called to war. World War II saw many civilian ships converted for military purposes, and the Seeandbee was no exception. She was converted to operate as an aircraft carrier and rechristened the USS Wolverine. Under her new name she saw service training carrier pilots for shipboard landings and takeoffs. The USS Wolverine operated out of Chicago on Lake Michigan until the end of the war and was decommissioned and scrapped in 1946.

All of this is interesting – well, at least to someone like me who enjoys digging through dusty magazines – but it’s not why I found the little ad for cruises aboard the Seeandbee so intriguing. You see, the ad comes from a 1935 issue of The Rotarian Magazine, a call for business-folk across the Midwest to spend their hard-earned salaries on a little shipboard frivolity, but on August 12, 1940 when the ship docked in Cleveland one of its passengers wouldn’t be disembarking.

Mrs. Benjamin Mozee, a retired teacher from Nome, Alaska, boarded the Seeandbee on July 24^th and, according to her sister, had in her possession a large amount of money as well as three diamond rings none of which were found in her state room. On July 31^st the battered body of Mrs. Mozee washed up on the shore at Geneva-on-the-Lake and, adding insult to the injustice that had been done to her, since there wasn’t anyone who could identify the body, she was buried in an unmarked grave.

The money and jewelry weren’t the only things that had disappeared when the ship docked. Mrs. Mozee had been attended by a maid while on shipboard. The maid was a member of the Seeandbee’s crew and had tended to her during the voyage. Investigators found that the maid had disappeared immediately after the cruise.

When Mozee’s body was identified there could be little doubt she hadn’t simply fallen overboard and drown. The body showed signs of a beating and grease on Mrs. Mozee’s palms suggested she’d been in the crew area of the ship. An FBI investigation followed, but there is no record of there being an arrest, trial, or conviction associated with the murder.