Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  For Earle Leonard Ferral, on the other hand, even the most minimal demands of army life proved too onerous. After just six weeks in uniform, he went AWOL because he was forced to stand guard duty one night in the cold.

  Among the various religious works Earle had read during his stint in San Quentin was a life of Joseph Smith. Following his desertion, he made his way to Salt Lake City. His interest in Mormonism came to nothing, but—for unknown reasons—he decided to give the military another shot. Enlisting as a cook in the navy, he soon found himself back in his hometown stationed at San Francisco’s Mare Island Naval Base.

  This second fling at military life, however, turned out to be no more successful nor long-lasting than his first. Once again, he deserted after a few weeks because of chores he regarded as too oppressive.

  Less than two months later, however—in July 1917, not long after the first American troops arrived in France—Earle enlisted once again, this time as a private in the Medical Corps. He lasted six weeks, deserting because (as he would later explain to military psychologists) he was bothered by “burning about his anus” from his hemorrhoids.

  He was back in the navy in March 1918—around the tune that the German army launched a massive assault on the Western Front, where American doughboys were fighting shoulder to shoulder with their French and British allies. This time Earle did not desert; he simply refused to work, preferring to pass his days reading the Bible and spouting apocalyptic prattle about the coming of the Great Beast whose number is 666. Earle found himself shunned by his shipmates and assailed by his superior officers. Nothing, not even a tortuous, two-day confinement inside a stifling coke oven, could force him to fulfill his duties.

  On April 24, 1918, after complaining bitterly of headaches and refusing to leave his cot, he was placed in the Mare Island Naval Hospital. After three weeks of observation by a hospital psychologist named Ogden, Ferral was committed to the Napa State Mental Hospital, arriving on May 21, 1918, just nine days after his twenty-first birthday.

  In the papers he forwarded to Napa, Ogden summed up his reasons for recommending commitment. The subject, he wrote, “continually reads his testament or gazes fixedly into space; answers questions slowly; takes no interest in what is going on about him; shows some mental deterioration. Due to refusing to work, he was put in coke oven for two days but still would not work. His reason for not working is that he did not want to serve the adversaries of the Lord. He believes the beast spoken of in Revelation as being #666 is either the pope or the kaiser. He does not think he is crazy.” Ogden’s conclusive diagnosis was “Constitutional Psychopathic State.”

  * * *

  Immediately after his arrival at Napa, Earle was examined by Dr. J. B. Rogers, who would oversee his treatment for the next thirteen months. Physically there seemed to be nothing anomalous about the robust, well-nourished young man except for one ocular peculiarity: his right pupil was notably larger than the left. His teeth were also (as Rogers wrote in his report) “remarkable” in their perfection, so strikingly square and even that they would have been the envy of a matinee idol.

  From interviewing Earle, Dr. Rogers learned that the young man had contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea in early adolescence. (Subsequent blood tests confirmed the presence of both diseases.) Earle confessed that he had masturbated daily between the ages of thirteen and eighteen but “not since then.” He also claimed to have overcome his “addiction to liquor,” swearing that he had not had a drink for seven months. He described his childhood life as “pleasant,” insisted that “his mind is all right,” and declared that he was perfectly capable of “making his way in the world.” He had, he said, no “history of trauma or previous mental attacks.”

  After putting various pointed questions to the young man for about ten minutes, Rogers concluded that Earle was not disoriented, paranoid, or abnormally depressed. The patient (Rogers wrote in his report) was “correct for place, month, and year—did not think anyone was trying to harm him—was not despondent, nervous, or apprehensive and did not think he should have been sent here. Denied illusions or hallucinations. Cheerful at time of examination. Denies being irritable. Says he approves of sociability very much and enjoys himself to a reasonable extent. Could take an interest in an occupation—is very fond of his family and is so fond of them that he feels bad to be away from home.”

  “Would you say you’ve noticed any changes in yourself since joining the navy?” Rogers asked, to which the young man replied, “Well, I have a stronger tendency to seek higher ideals and sensible things than I used to.”

  Next, Earle was subjected to a battery of intelligence tests, most of which he performed well on. “Test of Memory Pictures in General good,” reads Rogers’ report. “Memory of Ideas in Series good. Knowledge of Arithmetic excellent. General Knowledge correct except for the name of the Governor of California and rate of interest a bank usually pays. Memory of Recent Past good. No Disturbance of Idea Association. Orientation good.”

  When Rogers related the fable about the wolf who disguises himself as a shepherd but gives himself away when he opens his mouth to speak, Earle offered a reasonable summary of the moral: “It shows that when a person is not always truthful they suffer for it.”

  Earle insisted “that it was not difficult for him to think.” When Rogers asked if he “experienced any peculiar thoughts,” Earle replied, “Well, not exactly—not any more than a first-class intelligent person would.”

  “Do you believe you’ve done anything wrong?” asked Rogers.

  “Yes,” said Earle. “I blame myself for enlisting in the navy.”

  Rogers then asked if the young man was afraid of anything.

  “Only God,” Earle answered. Then, fixing Rogers with a meaningful stare, he said, “If you don’t serve Him, you should be afraid, too.”

  Exactly whose God Earle believed in at the moment is somewhat ambiguous. For unknown reasons, his commitment papers record his affiliation as Jewish. It is possible that Earle, who was always flirting with different religions, was going through a brief Judaic phase. It may also be the case that Dr. Rogers assumed (in the casually racist manner of his day) that Earle must be Jewish because of his swarthy complexion and broad nose. If so, this is not the only mistake Rogers recorded on his written report.

  The other, far more serious, error appears just a few lines down from the misstated religion, where the psychologist concluded that Earle Leonard Ferrai was “not violent; homicidal; or destructive.”

  Several weeks after his transfer to Napa, Earle received a visit from his Aunt Lillian and Uncle Willis. We do not know what words passed between them, though Lillian would later testify that her nephew, who was dressed in his sailor’s uniform, was unhappy with his treatment. Exactly what that treatment consisted of is also undocumented. The record shows, however, that on June 13, 1918, Earle managed to escape.

  He was tracked down and returned to Napa on July 11. Six weeks later, on August 25, he escaped again. This time, he remained at large for over three months. When he was brought back to Napa on December 3, his obvious gifts as a breakout artist earned him the ultimate tribute from his fellow inmates. They began calling him “Houdini.”

  As soon as the United States entered the war, the great “escapologist” himself had registered for the draft. But at age forty-three, Harry Houdini was too old for military service. Determined to do his part, Houdini immediately declared that he would cancel his vaudeville bookings and devote himself to patriotic causes. For the duration of the war, he staged a string of highly publicized benefits for the Red Cross, the Army Athletic Fund, the widows of the young men who had died aboard the torpedoed troopship, Antilles, and more. At one point, he put his talents to a novel use, teaching soldiers how to escape from German handcuffs should they ever be captured by the enemy.

  Breaking out of handcuffs, of course, was child’s play to the world-famous “self-liberator,” who could work himself free of the most fiendish restraints human ingenuit
y could devise—sealed and buried coffins, padlocked milkcans filled with beer, tightly nailed wooden crates submerged in rivers. During one public demonstration in the nation’s capital, an enormous crowd—the “biggest ever assembled except for the inauguration of a president” (according to the Washington Times)—watched him wiggle out of a straightjacket while, hooked to a rope, he dangled from his heels 100 feet above the sidewalk.

  After enjoying one of his performances, Woodrow Wilson paid a call on Houdini. “I envy your ability to escape from tight places,” remarked the president. “Sometimes, I wish I were able to do the same.”

  In spite of his new nickname, Earle’s feats were, of course, on an infinitely smaller scale than Houdini’s. Still, they were impressive in their way. The very day after his return to Napa, he escaped yet again. Hauled back a few months later, he managed one final “elopement” (in the language of his official records). Altogether he pulled off no fewer than four escapes during his thirteen-month incarceration.

  By the time of his final breakout in May 1919, the war had been over for six months. The Paris Peace Conference was underway at Versailles and millions of veterans were struggling to readjust to civilian life. For ten million other young men, life’s struggles were over.

  This time, the navy, which had been paying for Earle’s treatment at Napa, did not even bother pursuing him. He was simply written off, formally discharged from the service on May 17, 1919.

  On his hospital record, his supervising physician, Dr. Rogers, made a final entry as wildly mistaken as his earlier observation about Earle’s harmlessness. Describing the patient’s condition upon his discharge from service, Dr. Rogers noted simply that Earle Leonard Ferrai was “improved.”

  5

  †

  Lillian Fabian, referring to Mrs. Mary Fuller, her niece by marriage

  She’s almost like a mother to him, you know, as she’s twice his age. Often he would leave her flat, and she wouldn’t hear from him for months at a time. But she understands him, and he is much better off married to her than to a flapper.

  He returned to his Aunt Lillian’s home and within days found work as a janitor at St. Mary’s Hospital. At that point, before the navy decided to cut its losses by simply discharging him, Earle was still a fugitive. As a precaution, he took the job under a pseudonym, the first of many he would assume in the coming years: Evan Louis Fuller.

  The work was strictly menial. What redeemed it from absolute drudgery was the presence of a congenial co-worker, a cleaning lady in the maternity ward, who cast a spell of enchantment over Earle.

  To other eyes, her charms were not quite as evident as they were to his. Even she was bewildered by the young man’s regard. No one else in her life had ever lavished such attention on her, and she had already lived a considerable span.

  Her name was Mary Teresa Martin. She was a pinched and gray-haired spinster who resided in a boardinghouse a short trolley-ride away from the hospital. In the spring of 1919, she had just turned fifty-eight and looked every day of it.

  Her other co-workers regarded Mary as a sweet, if mousy, old maid. Painfully shy, she could be tongue-tied to the point of incoherence around other adults. Addressed by her supervisor, Mary would cast her eyes downwards, wring her hands nervously, and stammer a barely audible response.

  Earle was the single exception to this rule, the only other adult she seemed fully at ease with. Of course, having just turned twenty-two, he was a child by comparison to the aged Mary. He often acted like a child, too—a big, irrepressible boy full of puppyish enthusiasm. At the same time, there was a worldliness about him, the air of someone who had already seen and done things that the timorous spinster had never so much as dreamed of, let alone experienced.

  The details of their early relationship—how Mary and Earle first came to speak, the course of their friendship, the blossoming of their love—are largely unknown. To the diffident old maid, the young man must have seemed deeply compelling, a fascinating mix of worldly experience and childlike exuberance. Besides, he was clearly a serious individual who was always musing on religious matters and citing Scripture by heart, traits that must certainly have made an impression on the pious Mary.

  And there was something else about him that quickly became evident, a raw emotional neediness that brought out powerfully maternal feelings in the elderly woman. Something about the nearly sixty-year-old Mary Martin also stimulated powerful feelings, though of a significantly different nature, in Earle Ferral.

  Just a few weeks after they met, Earle broached the subject of marriage. Mary, who had waited her whole life for a proposal, seemed ready to accept. There was, however, an obstacle. She was Irish Catholic; Earle was a Protestant. Always open to varieties of religious experience, he had no objection to a wedding conducted according to the rituals of the Roman Catholic church.

  And so on Tuesday, August 5, 1919, at St. Agnes’ Rectory, Mary Teresa Martin married a man young enough to be not just her son but her grandson. And Earle Leonard Ferral took a wizened bride, the first in a string of elderly women who would become the objects of his increasingly deadly obsession.

  The newlyweds rented a few cramped rooms in a dilapidated house on Masonic Avenue and Eighth Street. Sheltered as she was, Mary Fuller understood, of course, that matrimony required patience, even fortitude. After all, the vows she had taken spoke directly of its vicissitudes: “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” Even so, she wasn’t prepared for life with Earle Leonard Ferrai. Who could have been? As she herself would later testify, in her primly understated way, her brief time with the man she knew as Evan Fuller was a “trying experience.”

  His personal habits were an early source of mortification to the fastidious Mary. It quickly became clear that her husband’s standards of hygiene were not much higher than a hobo’s. He rarely bathed, a problem that acquired a special urgency in their claustrophobic living quarters. Mary was immediately cast into the role she would play throughout their marriage, the long-suffering mother to Earle’s feckless son.

  One evening, before they were about to go out and visit her family, Mary finally put her foot down and insisted that he bathe. With a relenting shrug, Earle disappeared into the bathroom and emerged moments later carrying a glass of water. Then, seating himself on the edge of their mattress, he removed his shoes and socks and poured the contents of the glass over his feet.

  “That is your bath?” Mary exclaimed.

  Earle nodded. “My toes are nice and clean. That’s what counts.” With that, he slipped his shoes and socks back on and made ready to leave.

  His public behavior also made her squirm with discomfort. Just a few blocks from their house was a down-at-the-heels little eatery called the Blossom Restaurant where the food, if not especially palatable, was plentiful and cheap. For prices ranging from ten cents to two bits, a diner could eat his or her fill of pigs’ feet and kraut, meatballs and beans, oxtail goulash, lamb stew, or Yankee pot roast—coffee, tea, or buttermilk included.

  Every now and then, when their finances allowed it, Earle and Mary would treat themselves to dinner at the Blossom. But the experience invariably proved a trial for poor Mary. To begin with, her husband’s diet was highly eccentric. He would take forever to study the menu, then order something like a bowl of stewed prunes or a dish of boiled spinach. Mary (who, in spite of her scrawny physique, could pack away a corned-beef-and-cabbage dinner with gusto) was always disconcerted by Earle’s peculiar choices.

  But watching him eat was far worse. Seated with his hat pulled so low on his head that it half-covered his ears, he would raise the dish to his face and consume its contents as though he were feeding at a trough. The patrons of the Blossom weren’t sticklers when it came to etiquette. It was the kind of place where the men shovelled up their black-eyed peas with their knife blades. But at least they ate with utensils. Even in that greasy spoon, Earle’s table manners drew ugly stares.

  His freakish fashion sens
e, unmodified since childhood, was also a source of constant mortification to Mary. He would leave home in the morning dressed in decent clothes, then show up later that day in a completely different outfit, garments so tattered that a tramp would have scorned them. Or he might appear in some outlandish getup, purchased for a pittance from one of the secondhand shops in the Tenderloin—a sailor’s suit, golfing apparel, or the uniform of a Stanford University student. At other times, he would come home in a weird, color-coordinated ensemble, arrayed from head to foot in white or yellow or green.

  Like another elderly woman who had been burdened with him—his grandmother, Jennie, who resembled Earle’s new wife in more ways than one—Mary did what she could to keep him presentable. But her efforts were unavailing. Early in their marriage, she used some of her savings, painfully amassed over many years, to buy him a new overcoat. The following day, Earle went off wearing her gift. When he returned that evening, the coat was gone. So were the rest of his clothes, which had been replaced with a suit of rags. He had also managed to lose his underwear, a habit of his since childhood.

  The self-abasing Mary did not reproach her husband, though she never bought him clothing again. She did not even chide him when she came home one evening and discovered that he had removed her best brown-cloth skirt from her trunk, cut it up, and fashioned it into a pair of trousers for himself. Dressed in one of his baggy, thrift-shop shirts and the crudely stitched pants, he looked like a shipwreck survivor. But what use was there in upbraiding him? By then, Mary Fuller had already concluded (as she would later testify) that her husband “was not reponsible for his acts.”