Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Because Van Slingerland is the major source of information about the case, his curious lack of clarity about this issue colors almost everything written about the Massie case going forward from 1966. People now write about Thalia Massie as if she was a manipulative bitch who was probably making the whole thing up. She wasn’t, and this seems to me inappropriate.

  On March 25, 1931, a large number of people, some black and some white, had hopped a freight train as it left Chattanooga, bound for Memphis. A fight developed on the train, between a group of young black men and a group of young white men, and the white youths—outnumbered about fifteen to six—were forced to jump off the train. The white youths told their story to a stationmaster shortly after their departure. The stationmaster telegraphed ahead, and a group of white men, acting either as a posse or a klavern, grabbed their guns and stopped the train in Paint Rock, Alabama, where they pulled nine black youths off the train and placed them under arrest. Several other black men, probably including those most active in the fight, had wisely exited the train before it got to Paint Rock.

  Two white women were among those who had hopped the train. They had lived hard lives, and they had some cuts and bruises. Perhaps under pressure from the “posse,” these women now alleged that they had been raped by several of the black men after the fight.

  It is the consensus of those who have studied the case that no such crime had occurred. The allegation was toxic, however, and for two days it appeared nearly certain that the accused, ranging in age from twelve to nineteen, were about to be lynched. The governor of Alabama sent the National Guard to move them to a marginally more secure prison in Scottsboro, Alabama, which was only a few miles away.

  By April 9, 1931—two weeks after the fight—the nine Negro youths had been indicted, brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced to death. All nine of them, including the twelve-year-old. At this point the NAACP and the International Labor Defense Fund (commies) entered the case, and began to fight for the accused. This battle went on for many years, through trial after trial after trial. None of the accused was ever acquitted, and none was ever executed. Most were in prison for many years. The Scottsboro Boys became the most famous American Dreyfus figures between the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 and the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953.

  With the passage of time the Scottsboro case has become more famous than the Massie case, and, as they have several components in common, modern writers have begun to overlay the Scottsboro Boys onto the Massie case. The cases are very different. Hawaii was not Alabama. Those accused in Hawaii were not convicted, and those convicted in Alabama were not murdered. Thalia Massie was not a lying, manipulative, scheming prostitute like Victoria Price, who was the chief accuser of the Scottsboro Boys; Thalia Massie was a shy, socially awkward, immature young woman who liked to read and listen to good music, and who would have been much happier if she had gone to college rather than getting married at sixteen.

  On October 16, 1931—six months after the Scottsboro incident, five weeks after the rape of Thalia Massie—two women were shot to death in a duplex in Phoenix, probably by their ex-roommate, an attractive 26-year-old woman named Winnie Ruth Judd. Their bodies were packed into two trunks—one of the bodies had to be hacked up to accomplish this—and shipped to Los Angeles; don’t ask me why, since Phoenix at this time was a small city surrounded by hundreds of miles of empty desert. By the time they got to Los Angeles the trunks smelled to high heaven and there was blood oozing out of the bottoms, attracting the attention of the railroad.

  Winnie Judd was the daughter of a Methodist minister from Indiana. At age 19 she married a doctor in his early 40s. She never actually divorced him, but he didn’t do much of a job of supporting her, and by 1931 she was living in Phoenix, on her own, had a decent job, and was involved with the owner of a local lumberyard, a man named Jack Halloran. On the evening of the murders Halloran failed to show up for a date with Winnie. Angry, Winnie went to visit her two ex-roommates, who apparently had what was sometimes referred to as a Boston marriage. Some sort of argument developed, and Winnie shot them. Somebody—Halloran, we would guess—helped Winnie box up her dismembered friends and get a ticket to LA, sending the trunks ahead of her.

  Winnie was convicted of the murders on February 8, 1932 (three weeks before the Lindbergh kidnapping), and was sentenced to death. Before execution, however, she was adjudged to be insane. Locked up in what might very loosely be described as a “hospital” for the criminally insane, Winnie escaped from custody seven times over the years—twice in 1939, once in 1947, once in 1951, twice in 1952, and once in 1962. Generally she was re-captured after a day or two, but after the 1962 escape she was loose in San Francisco for six and a half years, being finally re-captured in June of 1969.

  By 1969 Winnie Judd was just a sweet old lady who wasn’t bothering anybody. In theory she was still in line to be executed if adjudged to be sane. With the help of Melvin Belli (a very famous attorney of the time), Ms. Judd was judged sane and paroled by the state of Arizona in 1971. She lived peacefully another 27 years, and died in her bed at the age of 93.

  Enjoy it; that may be the only story in our book that has a happy ending.

  We last saw Robert Stroud, a two-time murderer, at the start of Chapter Eleven. Spared the death penalty by first lady Edith Wilson, Stroud was ordered to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement. As a practical matter this was impossible. Locked in a dark hole without anyone to talk to, without anything to read or write, without anything to give shape to the ramblings of the mind, a few months in solitary confinement would reduce almost anyone to madness. The order called for cruel and unusual punishment, besides which few if any prisons actually have a place to lock a man in solitary for a period of years.

  In practice, “solitary confinement” became “isolation,” a segregated section of the Leavenworth prison reserved for discipline problems. In his first years behind bars, Stroud had established a small business making hand-painted greeting cards. He was a capable enough artist with time on his hands, so he would paint or draw cards, give them to his mother, and she would sell them, making a little money to contribute to his defense fund.

  Sometime in the summer of 1920, alone in the yard at Leavenworth, Stroud found a nest with a pair of baby sparrows in it. He smuggled it back to his cell, and made the birds into pets. This wasn’t news; other prisoners at Leavenworth had been allowed to keep pets.

  Having established the right to keep birds, Stroud asked for permission to get a canary. The authorities said OK. He got a couple of canaries, and began breeding them. He subscribed to some small newspapers that covered bird care and breeding. He got a few more birds, and began making his own cages, cardboard ones at first. He ordered birdseed. Advertising in small newspapers, he sold a few of his birds.

  He branched out from canaries to more exotic breeds. He got permission to have his own letterhead printed. Eventually he got enough birds that he started ordering birdseed in bulk. He got several varieties of birdseed, tested them on his birds, sifted and mixed the ingredients, and began to market his own line of bird food. Most of the people who bought birdseed from Stroud had no idea that they were ordering from a prison.

  In an institution where all letters were re-typed before being given to the recipient, where men had to request permission to write a letter, Stroud was running a small business. More important than the business was the research. When some of his birds took sick and died, Stroud began studying avian diseases. He made copious notes about the appearance and behavior of his birds, the time and date of each symptom. He performed autopsies on them after they died, gently tearing apart the flesh with his fingers, since he was not allowed to keep a knife.

  He began writing a column on bird diseases in one of the small papers serving the needs of bird fanciers. He ended up, twenty years later, as the world’s expert on the care and feeding of pet birds. In the 1930s he wrote and illustrated a book, Diseases of Canaries, the first book on
the subject published in more than 40 years. Ten years later he added a second and more impressive book, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds. He claimed to have developed cures for more than twenty avian diseases, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of birds. He sold a medicine, “Stroud’s Specific,” out of his cell.

  In a horribly overcrowded prison, with men sleeping on the floors of hallways, Stroud had two cells with a doorway cut between them. The two cells were crammed top to bottom with birdcages, birdseed, cleaning solutions, chemicals, tables, hot plates, a file cabinet, beakers, test tubes, a microscope, a microtome, thermometers, slides, books, magazines, government bulletins, a typewriter, typewriter ribbons, correspondence, envelopes, buckets of dirt, a manuscript and stacks of illustrations, metal, wire, and the tools used to build bird cages.

  The situation, from the standpoint of the prison, was out of control. Stroud’s explanation was that he simply did things, without asking, and then depended upon the argument of the status quo, that he had always been allowed to do this in the past. It would be equally true to point out that the warden of the Leavenworth prison was a progressive administrator who believed that prisoners should be given the opportunity to contribute to society in any way that they were capable of contributing. Faced with a thousand or so career criminals who had nothing to contribute and one Robert Stroud, he made Stroud into the showpiece of his reform program, the star attraction of every prison tour.

  Stroud’s remarkable sentence, life in solitary, put him in a different class from the other prisoners. This was used to justify his unusual treatment.

  Jolene Babyak, in a 1994 biography of Stroud (Bird Man: The Many Faces of Robert Stroud), argues that almost all of Stroud’s research on bird diseases was lacking in merit. Although Stroud worked very hard at analyzing bird diseases, she argues, he had no grounding in scientific methods, and no real understanding of them. He classified all diseases by their symptoms, which created no reliable diagnoses, since many different diseases can create similar symptoms (molting, diarrhea, convulsions, etc.). A modern reader, reviewing Stroud’s work today, would be unable to ascertain exactly what diseases he was describing. His cures, most of them, are of little value, and might in many cases be lethal.

  I am inclined to think that she misses the point. The point is, he did it. He started the research. He studied the subject as thoroughly as he could, developed treatments, and wrote books describing the results. He took his subject seriously. When no one else was interested in the problems of pet birds, he demonstrated that there was a need for such a text. If later researchers could do the job better (with more education and better facilities), power to them. If you had canaries in 1950 and you wanted to know how to take care of them, Stroud was what you had. Nobody gave that to him.

  XVI

  On June 3, 1945, a middle-aged woman was found murdered in her apartment in Chicago. The woman had been stabbed repeatedly and her throat had been cut, but bandages had then been wrapped around her neck, apparently in a belated effort to save her life. The victim had not been raped, but police found evidence that the killer had remained at the scene for some time following the crime, masturbating in various parts of the apartment.

  Six months later, on December 10, a woman who had been a soldier in World War II (a WAVE) was found dead in her apartment, her body stabbed and mutilated in a similar manner. The killer had written on the wall, in lipstick, “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself.” This vivid incident had a lasting effect on the imagination of the post-war public, and was copied in movies until it evolved into a cinematic cliché.

  The message had been left, and the women murdered, by William Heirens, a sixteen-year-old student at the University of Chicago. He had also committed numerous “fetish burglaries” in the area, stealing items whose value was that they excited him. Kill again he did. On January 7, 1946, a six-year-old girl, Suzanne Degnan, was abducted from her bedroom. Although a ransom note was left at the scene, Heirens murdered and dismembered the little girl before dawn, dropping the body parts in sewers around the area. At the time, this murder was not connected to the earlier crimes.

  Little Suzanne’s murder outraged and terrified the Chicago area in the months that it went unsolved. In June, 1946, Heirens was arrested during a burglary attempt. A routine check of his fingerprints put him in the middle of the Degnan investigation. Heirens admitted knowledge of the crime, but attributed this (and other murders) to a friend, George Merman (or Murman). Merman, police concluded, existed only in Heirens’ mind.

  Under the influence of sodium pentothal, Heirens confessed to the three murders. This endangered the investigation, as the Chicago police seemed surprised to learn that giving a juvenile truth serum and interviewing him without an attorney present might possibly taint the resulting confession. A deal was worked out, under which Heirens would plead guilty to the three crimes, but would avoid the death penalty.

  Heirens was sentenced to life in prison, and as of this writing, he is still working on it. Heirens became the first person in Illinois history to earn a college degree while incarcerated, and has also done graduate work. Now in his early eighties, Heirens has been a model prisoner, and has battled hard for his release. In the early 1950s he tried to get his case reviewed in the courts, but was eventually turned down by the Illinois Supreme Court (1954). In April, 1983, a federal judge ruled that Heirens had been rehabilitated and must be released from prison, but this was overturned on appeal. Heirens, who now denies the killings, is probably the longest-serving prisoner in the nation.

  Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—was murdered in Los Angeles in January, 1947. Accounts of her life always insist a little too forcefully that Ms. Short was not a prostitute, by which they seem to mean “yet.” An attractive young woman from Medford, Massachusetts, she had come to Hollywood to break into movies. For several months she had been crashing with friends, dodging from apartment to rooming house to seedy motel. Her teeth were cracking, and she was growing desperate. On January 9, 1947, she was dropped off by an acquaintance near the Biltmore Hotel. In the pre-dawn hours of January 13, her dismembered body—she had been cut in half—was carried from a black car, and deposited in an empty lot.

  This has become, in a sense, the American Jack the Ripper case—in this sense: that whereas the British have an apparently limitless appetite for books accusing some random citizen of being Jack the Ripper, Americans have somehow developed a healthy appetite for books accusing some random person of murdering the Black Dahlia. I have read all of these books, and I will tell you with absolute certainty that no one who is accused of being the murderer by any of these books had anything whatsoever to do with the crime, with one possible exception. The one book about the case that you should probably read, if you haven’t, is The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles, by Donald H. Wolfe (ReganBooks, 2005).

  Wolfe’s research about the case is very, very good. His explanation of the murder, his “who done it,” is the same sort of malarkey that all of the other books have to peddle. He names five people who he says committed the crime, and he claims that he has some good, hard, police locker room gossip to tie them to the case, which he got from this old cop who’s been dead for years now, but who told him all this good stuff before he died.

  The one exception is a guy named Jack Wilson, also known as Arnold Smith, and, I would guess, by quite a number of other names. If the things that Wolfe says about Wilson/Smith are true,

  a) That would be nice for a change, and

  b) Then in my opinion there would be a substantial likelihood that the man may have been involved in the crime, or may have committed it by himself.

  What seems to me fairly obvious, in the same sense that it is obvious that the world is flat, is that Elizabeth Short was probably murdered by an unidentified serial murderer. You have to understand … and it’s really difficult to wrap your mind around this concept, but it’s true
nonetheless … police in that era did not believe in serial murderers. The term “serial murderer” did not exist. There was no parallel term in use. “Mass murderer” or “crazed killer,” perhaps, but those terms referred to a particular type of multiple murderer.

  Serial murderers have existed in fiction for many years, but police until about 1980 absolutely insisted that they were exactly that: fiction. Oh sure, they would say, there is a case or two or record of crazy people who ran around murdering for excitement, but experienced policemen all “knew” that almost all “real” crimes were committed by persons who knew the victim.

  All the experienced policemen knew this, but the only problem was that it wasn’t true; there were just as many serial murderers around then as there are now, only they mostly were never caught because the police refused to look for them and didn’t know how to look for them anyway. Within a month of the murder of Elizabeth Short, and about seven miles away, police found the nude body of Jeanne French. The letters “B.D.” had been written on her body, but, according to Wolfe “it was obvious to [the police] that there was no relationship between the two cases. The MO was totally different.” It was one of those vast, incalculable idiocies to which the human race is prey, like “women are not intelligent enough to handle the affairs of the world,” which vast numbers of men believed just a generation ago. Our ability to misunderstand the world is without limit.

  Most murders, of course, are not committed by serial murderers, but there are a few obvious hallmarks of a serial murder victim. The Black Dahlia has all of those hallmarks. She was an attractive young woman, who would be a natural target for sexual sadism. She was not a prostitute, at least yet, but she was a woman down on her luck who could be easily persuaded to climb into a car with a man she did not know. Her body was found nude, obviously dumped somewhere other than where she was killed. She had been the victim of horrible abuse, and had been dismembered. Her body was placed in the wee hours of the morning in a location isolated enough to allow the murderer to drive away unseen. All of this is suggestive of a serial murderer at work.