Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  That was the last time Sylvia Gaines was seen alive. Her nude, ravaged body was discovered the following morning in a grove of alder trees a few yards from the lake. Her neck bore the marks of powerful fingers, and her skull had been crushed with a rock. Police found the makeshift weapon, dabbled with blood and hair, about fifteen feet away from the corpse.

  From various pieces of evidence, including a trail of blood leading from the shore to the alder grove, investigators concluded that, after being attacked by the rock-wielding assailant on the gravel trail, the mortally injured young woman had stumbled into the lake in a desperate effort to escape. Dragging her from the water, the killer had carried her into the alder grove, where he had throttled her to death, then ripped off her clothing and assaulted the body.

  Given the brutal particulars of the crime, police initially hypothesized that it was the work of the same shadowy fiend who had been terrorizing the California coast. It wasn’t long, however, before they were focussing on another, even more shocking possibility—that the killer was the victim’s own father, Wallace, who had been putting on a highly ostentatious show of grief ever since his daughter’s death.

  Speaking to reporters from his bed, the apparently prostrate man acknowledged that Sylvia had been a source of contention in the household. “It is true my wife and I quarrelled over Sylvia. Perhaps I was too attentive. I don’t know.” But he tearfully denied having harmed her. “To think that a finger of suspicion has been pointed at me,” he sobbed. “I—I who loved my daughter more than anything on earth!” His wife, who had returned from San Francisco to be at his side, stoutly defended his innocence.

  In spite of these protestations, however, incriminating evidence against Gaines began piling up as the investigation proceeded. Witnesses who saw him on the night of Sylvia’s death reported that he had been dressed differently earlier in the day, as though he had changed clothing sometime during the evening. When police sought to examine the garments he had been wearing at the time of the murder, Gaines could not produce them. Four boys who had been playing by the lakeside at the time of the killing had not heard any unusual sounds. “If Sylvia Gaines had been accosted in a threatening manner by a man she did not know,” Sheriff Matt Starwich opined, “she would have screamed, and the boys would have heard it.”

  And then there was the neighbor who told police that around 10:00 P.M. on the night Sylvia was killed, Wallace Gaines had shown up at his door in a highly agitated state begging for a drink and muttering something about murder.

  After interrogating Gaines at home on Friday, June 25, Sheriff Starwich met with reporters and announced that the case was solved. “The fiend theory is bunk,” he scoffed. When one of the reporters asked if Wallace Gaines was now the primary suspect, the sheriff refused to comment. But he didn’t have to. He simply stared at the reporter with a look that seemed to say, “What do you think?”

  So it hardly came as a surprise when, on Tuesday, June 29, Wallace Gaines was arrested for the murder of his twenty-two-year-old daughter. The news was titillating enough to make the front pages as far away as Santa Barbara. But by that time, it seemed almost anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. Besides, the citizens of Santa Barbara had something more urgent to worry about by then.

  Five days earlier, on Thursday, June 24, another woman had been slam, a fifty-three-year-old boardinghouse proprietress named Ollie Russell. And this time the killer really was the “Dark Strangler.”

  13

  †

  Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover”

  That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

  Perfectly pure and good: I found

  A thing to do, and all her hair

  In one long yellow string I wound

  Three times her little throat around,

  And strangled her….

  It wasn’t as though Mrs. Russell was a careless woman or indifferent to the warnings that police had been issuing since Lillian St. Mary’s murder two weeks before. On the contrary. If anything, she seemed more apprehensive than most of her neighbors, taking unusual precautions to keep crime at bay.

  To deter burglars, she had fixed the windows of her home at 425 Chapala Street so that they could be opened no higher than six inches. And on the fateful day of her murder (as police later reconstructed the crime), she made sure to remove the rings from her fingers, tie them in a kerchief, and conceal them behind some books in her sitting room before answering the door.

  So there must have been something about the caller—something about his appearance, behavior, or manner of speech—that disarmed Mrs. Russell’s suspicions. The police could only guess at what that something might be. Only one fact was certain: That when the dark, stocky stranger appeared at her door, asking to see the vacant room advertised on a placard in her parlor window, Mrs. Russell let him inside.

  It was one of her boarders, a fireman for the Southern Pacific Railroad named William Franey, who discovered the murder—though the story he told the police seemed so peculiar that, for a short time, Franey himself fell under suspicion.

  Franey, who worked at night, was asleep in his room on the afternoon of June 24, when he was awakened by a commotion from the adjoining bedroom, which had been vacant for several weeks. Thinking that some new boarders were moving in and banging their luggage on the floor, Franey closed his eyes again. But when the noises continued, he arose from his bed, walked to the door which separated the two rooms and, bending low, peered through the keyhole.

  Much to his confusion, he saw a man, with his trousers pulled down to his knees, lying atop a woman, whose features were obscured by the man’s body. The banging noise that had awakened Franey was the knocking of the headboard on the wall, the result of the man’s vigorous motions.

  Embarrassed, Franey moved away from the door and walked over to the bureau to check the time on his pocket watch—3:32 P.M. He stood there for a moment in a state of nervous excitement, then stepped back to the door for a second peek.

  Through the keyhole he saw the man rise from the bed, pull up his trousers, and adjust his clothing, a dark gray suit that appeared to be in rather shabby condition. Then the man walked out of Franey’s range of vision.

  The woman, meanwhile, continued to lie motionless on the mattress, her dress drawn up above her hips, her stockinged legs parted and exposed. The window shades in the bedroom were drawn, and her head was turned so that Franey could not make out her features. But as he squinted through the keyhole, he began to grow convinced that the woman sprawled on the bed was his landlady, Mrs. Russell.

  At that moment, the man reappeared. Pulling out a pocket handkerchief, he mopped his brow, then plucked his greasy, gray fedora from the mattress, brushed it off with a jacket sleeve, settled it on his head, and strolled from the room shutting the door behind him.

  Flustered and sweaty, Franey left his own room and walked onto the back porch where a washbasin was set on a little table. After splashing some cold water onto his face, he dried himself with a towel then stood there and wondered what, if anything, he should do.

  It was obvious that the man in the gray suit was not Mrs. Russell’s husband, George, who ran a pool hall and eatery called the Texas Lunch at 622 State Street. Franey found it hard to believe that the fifty-three-year-old landlady would be entertaining gentlemen callers while her husband was away at work. But stranger things had happened, and Franey was not the kind to poke his nose into other people’s private affairs.

  The bedroom in which the woman lay led directly onto the back porch by way of a glass-panelled door. There was a curtain blocking the glass, but it was so loosely arranged that, by placing his face close to one of the panes, Franey could see inside the room.

  The woman was still lying in precisely the same position. But, viewing the bed from a different angle this time, Franey saw something he had not noticed before: dark stains on the mattress. They appeared to be blood.

  Hurrying around to the front of the house, he made for State Street an
d headed for the Texas Lunch.

  Halfway there, however, he came to a sudden halt and took a moment to reconsider. Perhaps Mrs. Russell was only sleeping. Perhaps the stains on the mattress weren’t blood—or, if they were, perhaps they’d been caused by a nosebleed. After all, there had been some pretty strenuous activity taking place on that bed.

  He turned around and headed back to the house.

  He reasoned that if Mrs. Russell was, in fact, napping, the best tack to take was to rouse her in a discreet, unintrusive way. Standing outside the front door, he put his finger on the doorbell. But though the buzzer sounded insistently, no one answered.

  He stepped inside the house. As he proceeded down the hallway, he noticed something peculiar. The door to Mrs. Russell’s bedroom was standing open. Franey had never known her to leave it open before, not even when she was at home. She was too nervous about her own safety. He poked his head inside and called out to her.

  Silence. This time Franey felt something stronger than worry—something closer to alarm. Hurrying outside, he jumped into his automobile and drove the few blocks to the Texas Lunch.

  Franey still wasn’t sure what he’d seen in the next-door bedroom. Hanky-panky? Foul play? He thought he’d better approach the subject cautiously. Spotting George Russell at the back of the pool hall, Franey walked over and asked if he knew where Mrs. Russell was.

  “Why, she’s at home,” Russell replied, surprised at the question. “Unless she’s gone over to play cards at Clara Brown’s house.”

  “Has the apartment next to mine been rented?” Franey asked.

  “Not as far as I know,” Russell said. By this point, his brow was furrowed with concern. When he asked Franey what was going on, the fireman told him about the strange noises coming from the next-door room, though he took care to say nothing about what he had seen. “I think you’d better come home and have a look,” Franey advised.

  A few minutes later, the two men were back at the boardinghouse. Discovering that the door to the vacant bedroom was locked, they headed around to the rear porch. Peering through the partly obscured pane in the door, Russell could see the woman stretched out on the bed. But he couldn’t make out her face.

  The two men decided to check with several of Mrs. Russell’s friends in the neighborhood, but no one had seen the landlady since 2:45 P.M. when she’d paid a brief visit to her friend, Laura Fields, who had given her a jar of homemade jelly. Shortly after three, Mrs. Fields had received a thank-you call from her friend. That was the last anyone had heard from Ollie Russell.

  Returning to his house with Franey, George Russell hunted up a key to the door of the bedroom, opened it, and stepped inside. “My God,” he gasped, clutching Franey’s arm. Franey stood there for a moment with gaping eyes, then ran to call the police.

  Her battered face gruesomely discolored, Ollie Russell lay dead on the mattress. She’d been strangled with a loop of cord pulled tight enough to tear the flesh of her throat. Blood had spattered from her neck onto the mattress, and there were bloody marks on the casing of the door.

  William Franey himself was the first to fall under suspicion. After paying a visit to the crime scene, Police Captain S. S. Kelley declared that it would have been “extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Franey to have seen the things he said he saw through a keyhole.” It seemed equally unlikely that the fireman could have peered through the backdoor glass pane and “seen blood on the bed where the dead woman lay, as her body was between the glass and the blood spots.”

  While Franey was detained at police headquarters, his room was thoroughly searched by criminologist J. Clark Sellers, who had been summoned from Los Angeles to assist with the case. Within twenty-four hours, however, District Attorney Clarence Ward ordered Franey released for lack of evidence.

  By then, Drs. Frank Nuzum, Kent Wilson, and William Moffat had completed the autopsy on Mrs. Russell’s body at the funeral parlor of Charles Holland. The autopsy revealed that, as D.A. Ward disclosed to reporters, the victim had been “attacked by a degenerate” who had violated her body after death. This ghastly finding confirmed what many had already assumed, that the landlady’s killer was the same fiend who had already perpetrated three identical atrocities in the Bay Area. “There is no doubt in my mind,” Police Chief Lester Desgrandchamp declared, “that the murder was committed by the strangler.”

  At Desgrandchamp’s orders, a telegram was transmitted to every city along the coast, alerting police to be on the lookout for a man matching the description provided by Franey. The next morning, a similar bulletin was featured on the front page of the Santa Barbara Daily News:

  * * *

  POLICE ASK ALL AID IN

  MURDER HUNT

  The man who is alleged to have strangled Mrs. Ollie Russell at 425 Chapala Street on Thursday afternoon is described by William J. Franey as:

  Age about 35 years.

  Height about 5 feet 8 inches.

  Medium build.

  Rather high cheekbones.

  Dark skin, rather thin face.

  Long wavy sandy hair.

  Looks like a laborer.

  Was dressed in a dark grey suit, clothes were not in a very good condition and rather shabby.

  Had on a grey fedora hat which may have some grease spots on it.

  Broad chest and shoulders.

  Communicate with the police department at once if a man answering this description is seen.

  * * *

  From San Francisco to the Mexican border, investigators combed the coastline in search of the strangler. In Santa Barbara itself, police launched the biggest manhunt in city history. Over the next week, they arrested a succession of suspects, only to release each of them within hours.

  A drifter named Clark Culer was picked up for no other reason than that he was wearing a greasy, gray fedora. He was let go after Franey failed to identify him. A man decked out in a different type of hat became the object of a brief, citywide search after a streetcar conductor named W. M. Blevans reported that, on the afternoon of the murder, a passenger in a Panama had asked for directions to 425 Chapala. As it happened, this mysterious suspect, who promptly showed up at police headquarters, had a perfectly innocent explanation for his interest in Mrs. Russell’s rooming house. He turned out to be a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, who had been sitting at the local club alongside his fellow member Coroner E. G. Dodge, when the latter was notified of Mrs. Russell’s slaying. Having nothing else to do, the man decided to go check out the crime scene simply out of curiosity.

  Other suspects who proved to have airtight alibis included a man named George Boska, who was picked up after telling a friend that police were on his trail; one Theodore Anderson of San Francisco, arrested after threatening the life of a female acquaintance in her hotel room at 168 Eddy Street; and Mrs. Russell’s former husband, Charles, a mail-truck driver in Riverside.

  Meanwhile, police were applying the latest advances in crime-detection technology in an effort to track down the strangler. Under the supervision of Sergeant Carl Newman, head of the Santa Barbara branch of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, a bloody thumbprint found on the door casing of the murder room was photographed by Deputy Sheriff Carl J. Wallace using a sophisticated fingerprint camera borrowed from the Ventura P.D. Afterward, the section of wood imprinted with the bloody mark was removed from the doorframe, carefully packaged, and sent to bureau headquarters in Sacramento for analysis by experts.

  Unfortunately, they were unable to come up with a match. The strangler case was rapidly turning into an embarrassment for the bureau whose achievements had been so highly touted in the national press.

  14

  †

  San Francisco Chronicle

  Brown’s story is somewhat incoherent.

  The week of August 8, 1926, wasn’t a time for particularly weighty news. Leafing through their morning papers, readers would have learned about Bishop Adna W. Leonard’s anti-Catholic
assault on Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York and aspiring presidential candidate. “No Governor can kiss the Papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House!” thundered Leonard, superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church and president of the AntiSaloon League. Bishop Leonard, whose attack formed a part of his Sunday morning sermon, devoted the bulk of his speech to a nationwide call for Anglo-Saxon unity against foreigners, particularly Latins.

  In the view of many people, who regarded the bishop’s remarks as distinctly un-Christian, two other men of the cloth fulfilled the precepts of their faith in a far more exemplary way. After leaping into the waters off Sidi-Biahr beach near Alexandria, Egypt, to rescue a trio of drowning girls, two American missionaries-the Reverends J. W. Baird and R. G. McGill of the United Presbyterian Church—ran back into the waves to help a struggling countrywoman, Mrs. A. A. Thompson of Pittsburgh. Before they could reach her, Mrs. Thompson had managed to swim out of danger and was floating placidly towards shore when the young missionaries themselves were caught in an undertow and drowned.

  Two other swimmers were luckier that week, narrowly escaping death during an attempt to cross the English Channel. Ten hours after setting out from Cape Gris-Nez, France, on Monday, August 9, Ishak Helmy and George Michel noticed that the crew of their accompanying tug, the Alsace, was frantically signalling to them. It took a moment for the swimmers to understand what all the commotion was about. An enormous school of sharks—at least twenty in all—was rapidly approaching the swimmers. Helmy and Michel were hauled to safety just as the sharks closed in. “I am not afraid of them,” Helmy said to reporters afterward. “But I do not like them.”

  Sharks weren’t the only man-eating creatures in the news that week. According to a report from the Chief Game Warden of the British Colony of Uganda, a unique race of maneating lions had created a virtual “reign of terror” in the Sanga district of Ankole. “An appalling death toll has resulted in the region,” wrote the warden. “One lion alone was responsible for eighty-four deaths and another for more than forty kills before they were destroyed.” Unlike the average lion—which has an instinctive fear of people and kills them only under extreme circumstances—the Sanga breed appeared to have an innate preference for human flesh, presumably inherited from man-eating forebears who had been “driven by accident or hunger in a period of starvation” to prey on the local populace.