The classic film ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ was based on a 1952 killing in Big Bay, and you can still visit the tavern where it happened
One of the most celebrated courtroom dramas ever made was not just a Hollywood invention. “Anatomy of a Murder” was based on a real killing in a U.P. bar that still stands in Big Bay.
It happened in the early morning of July 31, 1952.
Army Lieutenant Coleman Peterson walked into the Lumberjack Tavern in the tiny town of Big Bay, north of Marquette, and shot the bar’s owner, Maurice “Mike” Chenoweth, in front of a room full of customers.
Peterson’s wife, Charlotte, had told him that Chenoweth, a former state trooper who ran the tavern, had raped and beaten her hours earlier. Peterson said he went to confront him. He left with Chenoweth dead.
What made the case famous was not the shooting. It was the trial.
Peterson was charged with murder, and his defense fell to a local Marquette attorney named John Voelker. Voelker built his case around a rare and difficult argument: irresistible impulse, a form of temporary insanity that held Peterson was not in control of his actions when he pulled the trigger.
It worked. A jury found Peterson not guilty, and the case made Voelker’s name.
Here is where the story takes a turn no screenwriter would dare invent.
Voelker went on to become a Michigan Supreme Court Justice. And under the pen name Robert Traver, he wrote a novel based on the very case he had just won. He called it “Anatomy of a Murder.”
Published in 1958, it spent more than a year on the bestseller list and has sold over four million copies.
Then Hollywood came calling. Director Otto Preminger turned it into a 1959 film starring Jimmy Stewart, with a score by Duke Ellington, and it earned seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
And in a first for a major Hollywood movie, Preminger shot it on location, right here in the U.P. The crew filmed in Marquette, Ishpeming, and Big Bay, including inside the actual Lumberjack Tavern where the real shooting had happened.
And the Lumberjack is still there.
To this day, you can walk into the Lumberjack Tavern in Big Bay, where a giant movie poster hangs out front and the walls are covered in clippings from both the murder and the filming. The film’s logo is painted on the floor, marking the spot where Chenoweth fell, and you can still see bullet holes in the wall.
It joins a long list of U.P. spots where the story is half the draw, right alongside the mysterious Paulding Light out west.
The U.P. has never been short on legends, from a Hollywood murder trial to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior.
More than 70 years later, the case still draws film buffs and the curious up the winding road to Big Bay. Not bad for a story that started, and ended, in a little tavern at the edge of Lake Superior.
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Topics: Anatomy of a Murder, Big Bay, Lumberjack Tavern, Marquette County, John Voelker, true crime, U.P. history, Upper Peninsula, Yooper
Sources: Travel Marquette, The Detroit News, and Wikipedia.
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