A pair of notable thefts was also reported in the papers. In Madrid, three famous paintings—a Van Dyck, a Velasquez, and a Titian, whose combined worth was estimated at nearly half a million dollars—were stolen from the home of Seftor Isidor Urzaiz, brother of the late Spanish minister of finance. And at the Breakers, the magnificent Newport estate of General Cornelius Vanderbilt, three small boxes belonging to Mrs. Vanderbilt disappeared during a Saturday-evening dinner party. Much to Mrs. Vanderbilt’s delight, the missing boxes, which contained priceless jewelry and unset stones, were returned three days later by a gardener’s helper named Louis Shantler, who claimed to have discovered them under a bush on the estate of the Vanderbilts’ neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Twombly.
The scion of another eminent American family made the front pages that week, though not in a way that could have brought much pleasure to his relatives. On Tuesday, August 10, a member of the Rockefeller clan, twenty-two-year-old James Sterling Rockefeller, grand-nephew of John D., was collared by customs guard Louis P. Cassidy as the young man disembarked from an ocean liner following a vacation in France. Though the day was sweltering, Rockefeller was swathed in a heavy topcoat that was full of strange bulges. Searching its pockets, Cassidy turned up a motley assortment of stuff—fourteen razors, a pair of binoculars, a meerschaum pipe, and two radiator-cap ornaments—that the young man was attempting to smuggle into the country. Young Rockefeller, however, had no trouble in covering the fine of $476.20, which was paid in cash the following morning by his father’s accountant.
The big news from overseas that week emanated from England where members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science had gathered for their yearly convention at Oxford. On Tuesday, Sir Daniel Hall created a sensation by predicting an inevitable worldwide famine unless science found a way to increase food production. Professor Julian Huxley, on the other hand, charmed his listeners with his lecture on animal courtship, a talk that (as the New York Times playfully reported) gave vivid proof “that romance blossoms almost in the primal ooze, that even the humble bristleworm woos his mate in the moonlight, and that the male spider brings his inamorata a nice fly neatly wrapped in a silk bouquet.”
On the same day as Huxley’s speech, an American visitor to England, former Chief Detective Dougherty of the NYPD, made the papers by calling for the restoration of the old British custom of crossroads hangings:
I believe in the “horrible example system” which was in force in this country a century or so ago, when people were hanged at crossroads. In ninety-five cases out of a hundred today when a hold-up takes place, the resister is killed or wounded. The bandit has a revolver and intends to use it if necessary. Therefore, if he is caught, he should be strung up at once by the friends of the people he has killed.
Diverting though much of this was, none of it was especially earthshaking. But there was one front-page story that seemed momentous enough, at least to the citizens of San Francisco and particularly to those elderly landladies who had been living in terror for the previous five months. The headline appeared in the Chronicle on Wednesday, August 11: STRANGLINGS CONFESSED BY SUSPECT HELD IN NEEDLES, PRISONER ADMITS HE THROTTLED SEVERAL WOMEN IN CITIES OF PACIFIC COAST. After nearly half a year, it looked as though the “Dark Strangler” had finally been caught.
His name was Phillip H. Brown. At least that’s what he told the police when they picked him up for vagrancy in Needles, California, on Tuesday afternoon. He was a thoroughly seedy-looking tramp of medium height—hollow-chested, lank, and dressed in a shabby, dark-gray suit. His mug shots show a suntanned, unmemorable face, thin-lipped and heavily stubbled. The pupils of his eyes were a pale, frosted blue—his most remarkable and disconcerting feature.
From inside his jail cell, Brown revealed that he’d done time in two state penitentiaries, Colorado and Idaho. Then—in a casual, offhanded way, as though he were acknowledging some minor infraction like jaywalking or shoplifting—he mentioned that he’d recently had some “trouble with about twelve women” on the Pacific Coast and that he had “strangled to death a number of them.”
Though Brown’s confession was immediately trumpeted in the headlines, few people were prepared to accept it at face value. For one thing, there were some notable inconsistencies in his tale. When Sheriff Walter Shay of San Bernardino County arrived in Needles to interrogate the suspect, he discovered that Brown was rather “vague as to localities.” At first, the prisoner admitted having murdered three victims—one in San Francisco, one in San Jose, and one in Los Angeles. The only problem with this statement was that, as far as the authorities knew, no women had been strangled in Los Angeles during the previous six months.
Later that afternoon, Brown revised his story, claiming that he had killed two women in San Francisco, one in San Bernardino, one in Santa Barbara, and one “around Oakland.” But again, there were no records of a recent strangling case in Oakland.
One man who greeted the news of Brown’s confession with particular caution, if not outright skepticism, was Merton Newman, nephew of the strangler’s first known victim. “I don’t like to make a statement without seeing the suspect,” Newman told reporters. “But if the report that he is five-feet-eight-inches tall is correct, I doubt if he’s the man. I am five-feet-seven-inches in height, and I am positive that the man I talked with in the hall of my aunt’s house was shorter than I, unless the angle of vision at which I saw him deceived me. He was of stocky build, of very dark complexion, with smooth, glassy skin. He had very black hair, and his features were full and of the general contour of an Oriental, although there was a European cast to his expression. He had a square, muscular torso and was powerfully built, though very short.”
Certainly this description did not appear to fit the suspect, who was blue-eyed and raw-boned, with a face that would have seemed common in a British doss house. Arrangements were immediately made to have Brown’s mug shots sent to San Francisco so that Newman could view them.
The prisoner’s credibility received another blow when authorities turned up some additional facts about his background. It turned out that his name wasn’t Phillip H. Brown at all. He was actually a twenty-eight-year-old narcotics addict named Paul Cameron who had grown up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and was regarded as the shame of his otherwise respectable family. “He has been in trouble with authorities on a number of occasions in recent years,” his uncle Archibald told reporters, “and we do not care to have anything to do with him.”
Not only had Cameron done stints in the two state pens; he had also been a patient at the Southern California State Hospital for the Insane at Patton. He had managed to escape after only six months by prying off the window bars of his cell with an iron rod. According to Cameron’s statement, he had an older brother named William, also an inmate at Patton, who was “more daring than myself when not in confinement.” Though a check of the files at the mental asylum confirmed that Cameron had been committed there in 1915, there was no record of this alleged older brother.
It was beginning to seem as though Cameron were simply a dope-addled drifter and small-time crook who, out of his own bizarre motives, had decided to confess to the highly publicized crimes. Then something happened which added new weight to his story.
Under the custody of several officials, including District Attorney Clarence Ward and Chief of Police Lester Desgrandchamps, Cameron was transported to San Fernando. There, on Wednesday night, August 11, he was positively identified by William Franey as the man who had strangled Mrs. Russell.
The viewing took place at police headquarters. Cameron was placed inside a closed room, while Franey, led into the adjoining office, was asked to look at the suspect through the keyhole of the connecting door. Dropping to one knee, Franey squinted through the hole for a moment, then straightened up and declared unequivocally that Cameron was the man.
A crowd of reporters was waiting for Cameron as he was escorted from the building twenty minutes later. The gaunt-looking prisoner seeme
d to enjoy all the attention, grinning broadly and posing for cameramen as their flashlights exploded. However, when reporters began shouting questions—Had he ever attacked women in San Jose? In San Francisco? In Santa Barbara?—he grew visibly uncomfortable and began mumbling unintelligible replies.
Indeed, vagueness and confusion seemed to characterize virtually every statement from Cameron’s lips. Interrogated by Police Chief Desgrandchamps on Thursday morning, he claimed that he had been working in San Pedro until late May, when he decided to visit San Francisco. Shortly after arriving there on June I, he “strangled a woman on Dolores Street,” then, according to his story, headed south. After stopping briefly in King City, he went back to San Jose, where he supposedly “attacked a woman in a restaurant.” From San Jose, he proceeded to Santa Barbara. On the day of his arrival, he went looking for a bed in a lodginghouse. When the proprietress showed him up to his room, he claimed he “attacked her, beat her, and choked her with a cord,” then fled the city.
Unfortunately, Cameron was exceptionally hazy about the particulars of all these events—dates, times, addresses, names. And the few details he did provide were not at all consistent with the known facts. Nevertheless, based on Franey’s identification, D.A. Ward felt justified in declaring that there was “no doubt in my mind that Cameron is Mrs. Russell’s murderer.”
The developments of the following day didn’t make matters any less muddied. On the one hand, a report emerged from Piedmont that a man matching Cameron’s description had attacked an elderly landlady the previous month. On July 5, when sixty-year-old May E. Kenney answered the doorbell of her rooming house at 37 Sharon Avenue she found herself facing a dark, dishevelled stranger who said he was looking for a room. As soon as he stepped into the house, however, he slammed the door behind him, then grabbed Mrs. Kenney by the throat. Luckily, a plumber had been to the house the previous day and left a length of iron pipe standing in the hallway. Grabbing up this makeshift weapon, Mrs. Kenney had beat her assailant about the head and shoulders until he turned and fled. The elderly woman had been so traumatized by the attack that she had since moved back to her hometown, Carson City, Nevada.
This disclosure certainly seemed to bolster the case against Cameron. But even as Mrs. Kenney was making her way to Santa Barbara to view the suspect, another key witness, Merton Newman, was casting doubt on his guilt. After studying Cameron’s mug shots, which had finally arrived from San Bernardino, Newman met with reporters and declared absolutely that the suspect was not the Dark Strangler. “This is nothing like the man. The man I saw was very short, heavy, and erect, with somewhat foreign-looking features. This man is just the opposite of that type.”
Cameron himself added to the confusion by repudiating the confessions he had been making for the past several days. After being formally charged on Thursday afternoon with the murder of Ollie Russell, he spoke to reporters and insisted that he was not guilty of any crime. “They told me to say those things,” he growled before being led back to his cell. Though D.A. Ward scoffed at this accusation, other officials remained openly doubtful of Cameron’s guilt. The biggest problem, the papers reported, was the “condition of the prisoner’s mind. He will start a recital of his travels and crimes and then switch to unimportant topics. His conversation is ragged and his statements are hazy at times. He apparently is incapable of consecutive thought or narration. The police do not believe that this mental deficiency is assumed.”
Over the next few days, the police continued to pour all their efforts into the investigation of Cameron’s maddeningly indefinite story, attempting to establish its validity once and for all.
And then, on the afternoon of Monday, August 16, while the suspect remained locked up in the Santa Barbara city jail, the matter was settled with one sudden, brutal stroke.
15
†
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self, drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.
Stephen and Mary Nisbet, both in their early fifties, owned a small apartment building at 525 Twenty-seventh Street in Oakland. At around 4:50 P.M. on August 16, Mr. Nisbet, who also held a job as a school custodian, arrived home from work. Entering his second-floor flat, he called out to his wife but received no response. Inside the kitchen, he found the ingredients for a stew—sliced carrots, chopped onions, quartered potatoes—heaped on a cutting board, as though his wife had been interrupted in the midst of her dinner preparations. He assumed that she had stepped out on a sudden, unexpected errand—perhaps to borrow a needed ingredient from a neighbor—and would return momentarily.
Placing his jacket and hat on the hallway coattree, he spent a few minutes puttering around the apartment. In the bedroom, he found his wife’s purse sitting on her bureau. Obviously she couldn’t have gone far. Carrying his newspaper into the living room, he settled down in his easy chair and began to read. The big story of the day was the condition of movie idol Rudolph Valentino, who had been stricken with appendicitis on Saturday afternoon and was in acute danger from spreading peritonitis.
When Nisbet looked up from his paper, it was nearing six and his wife still hadn’t returned. Where in the world could she have gone? As far as he knew, there was only one errand she had intended to accomplish that day—to travel downtown to the offices of the Oakland Tribune and take out a classified, advertising the vacant flat on the first floor of their building. But she had planned to do that before noon.
He decided to check with the neighbors, but no one had seen Mary Nisbet all afternoon. Margaret Bull—one of the second-floor tenants, who was entertaining a pair of friends when Stephen Nisbet came to her door—suggested that he walk to the corner grocery. Perhaps his wife had needed to make a last-minute purchase.
After taking a peek inside the vacant first-floor flat to make sure that his wife wasn’t inside, Nisbet hurried to the grocery. But the proprietor, who was just closing up his store, hadn’t seen Mrs. Nisbet all day.
Returning to his apartment, Nisbet sat at the kitchen table and, forcing himself to stay calm, tried to run through all the possibilities. But as 7:30 P.M. came and went, he couldn’t sit still any longer.
Fifteen minutes later, he was at the police station. His wife, he reported to the desk sergeant, was missing. The officer listened sympathetically, then tried to allay Nisbet’s fears. It was not quite 8:00 P.M., just three hours since Nisbet had arrived home to find the apartment empty. Though Mrs. Nisbet’s absence was puzzling, particularly since she had gone off without her purse, it was too soon for alarm. The sergeant advised Mr. Nisbet to return to the apartment and wait another hour. If his wife wasn’t back by then, the police would look into the matter.
Back at his building, Nisbet decided to take another look inside the one place he hadn’t searched thoroughly, the vacant ground-floor apartment. Opening the unlocked door, he moved quickly through the living room, bedroom, and kitchen, turning on lights as he went. But the flat seemed completely vacant. The only place left to check was the bathroom, though what his wife would be doing in there he couldn’t imagine. Still …
Crossing to the end of the hallway, he swung open the bathroom door and switched on the light.
Upstairs, Margaret Bull and her two male visitors, Joseph Hill and Rawley DeBaw, were startled by a fearful scream from below. They were just heading to the door to investigate when Stephen Nisbet, ashen-faced and hysterical, came bursting into the flat, crying wildly for help.
When a wife is murdered, suspicion immediately alights on the husband, and so it was in the case of Stephen Nisbet. Still, he seemed like a most unlikely suspect. Everyone who knew the Nisbets—friends and family members, neighbors and tenants—attested to their deep devotion for each other. They were, according to al
l accounts, a “perfect couple” who basked in each other’s company and had never been known to quarrel. And, indeed, the double portrait that ran in Wednesday’s paper seemed to offer vivid proof of their closeness. The juxtaposed photographs showed a handsome, middle-aged pair whose faces, through years of loving intimacy, had grown so alike that they might have belonged to siblings.
That Nisbet truly loved his wife seemed confirmed by his reaction to her death. His grief was so violent that he appeared to be on the brink of a nervous collapse. Fearing that he might do physical harm to himself, the police kept him under close surveillance in the hours following his awful discovery.
Of course, even a man less attached to his wife might have been thrown into shock by the horror of what he had seen. Of the five landlady-killings committed to that date, the murder of Mary Nisbet was, in many respects, the most brutal. Her husband had found her sprawled facedown on the tiled floor of the bathroom. She had been garrotted with a kitchen towel, knotted around her throat and pulled with such savage force that the fabric had frayed. The ferocity of the attack had puckered her neck as though it were a tightly squeezed pastry tube. Her blackened face had been slammed against the tiles as the killer knelt on her back. Fragments of her shattered front teeth lay in a bloody pool that seeped from her mouth. Her hair was wildly dishevelled, her clothing badly torn, her lower body naked and bruised.
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