Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  The debate over Beata Withers’ “trunk death,” meanwhile, remained as heated as ever. After consulting several medical treatises on asphyxiation, County Coroner Earl Smith told reporters that, as far as he could see, the Withers case “looked like murder.” During the “second stage” of asphyxiation, he explained, the person lapses into unconsciousness, but the body and limbs begin moving spasmodically, even violently, “due to the action of uncirculated blood on the nerves.” If Mrs. Withers had suffocated inside the trunk, Smith said, she would have dislodged the tray and trunk lid in her death throes. Her body certainly wouldn’t have been lying in the “peaceful, apparently sleeping attitude in which it was found.”

  There was only one possible conclusion, Smith said. Mrs. Withers was already dead before she was placed in the trunk.

  Counter to Coroner Smith’s statement, however, was the opinion of a “high police official,” who, speaking anonymously to reporters on Sunday evening, pointed out that there were no apparent marks of violence on Mrs. Withers’ body. Moreover, her “love diary” proved that she was “hopelessly despondent, that she owed bills amounting to several hundred dollars, and that her house was about to be turned over to the mortgage holders.” For these and other reasons—including the testimony of her good friend, Bob Frentzel, who told investigators that she had threatened suicide the previous year—the unnamed official held firm to his belief that Beata Withers had taken her own life.

  Over the next few days, the controversy continued to rage. Early Monday morning, Chief Jenkins, pronouncing the situation “the most baffling and mysterious ever to come within the scope of the Portland police,” met with Mayor Baker to request an emergency appropriation of $1,000. The funds, the chief told reporters, would be used “to bring to the city some nationally known criminologist to take charge of the case.” Expressing his belief that the three deaths appeared to be the work of a “methodically working pervert,” Jenkins declared that “if such a killer is at large, the matter of money should be our smallest worry.”

  To be sure, there was no indication that any of the women had been sexually molested, a fact which, in the view of certain officials, seemed to undercut the murder theory. Asked about this aspect of the case, Chief Jenkins replied that there were “numerous varieties of perverts,” including those who killed “solely for the thrill of it.”

  Every available detective had been assigned to the case. In addition to James Tackaberry and his partner, Robert Phillips, the team consisted of a dozen investigators including, by a bizarre coincidence, one named Earl Nelson. “As of now,” Chief Jenkins declared, “all other police work is secondary.”

  Other members of the department, however, continued to take issue with the chief, insisting that Beata Withers had committed suicide and that Virginia Grant, who suffered from heart disease, had died of natural causes. As for Mabel Fluke, these skeptics conceded that she may have been killed, but her death, they argued, was unrelated to the others. Whatever similarities existed among the three cases were “merely coincidental.”

  Of course, the skeptics had trouble explaining away certain inconvenient facts, such as the missing overcoats and jewelry. On Monday evening, Mrs. Withers’ cousin, Carl Duhrkoop, made another discovery that cast serious doubt on the suicide theory. Going through Beata’s belongings, Mr. Duhrkoop discovered that every piece of the dead woman’s underwear was gone.

  Late Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Baker met in his office with a group of officials, including Police Chief Jenkins; Detective Lieutenants Thatcher and Graves; County Coroner Earl Smith; and the three physicians in charge of the autopsies, Drs. Robert Benson, Harvey Myers, and Frank Menne. The purpose of the conference, the first of its kind in Portland history, was (as the newspapers reported) “to coordinate the scientific and medical features of the cases with the police angles.”

  Nothing, however, came out of the meeting but more ambiguity. While Jenkins and his subordinates saw the deaths as the work of a single killer—“someone using some cunning method”—the physicians were inclined to the opposite view, that the three cases were unconnected. According to their preliminary findings, “Mrs. Fluke met death by strangulation, possibly self-imposed; Mrs. Grant died of natural causes; and Mrs. Withers died of suffocation, possibly selfinflicted.”

  The coroner’s jury investigating the Withers case was riven by the same conflict of opinion. Convening on Wednesday evening, the six jurors heard the testimony of various witnesses, including Mrs. Withers’ fifteen-year-old son, Charles; her good friend, Bob Frentzel; her neighbor, G. C. Cook (who, along with Frentzel, had found the body); coroner’s physician Benson; and a police inspector named R. H. Craddock (the officer who, at Detective Tackaberry’s orders, had squeezed inside the trunk).

  After deliberating for more than an hour, however, the jury failed to reach a verdict, with three members reportedly voting for suicide, the others for murder.

  The matter remained unresolved the following day, when funeral services for Beata Withers were held at the Miller and Tracy chapel. Immediately afterwards, her body was transported to the Portland crematorium for its final disposition.

  On Friday, October 29, 1926, Portlanders were briefly distracted from the case of the three “mystery deaths” by some sad news from Detroit.

  One week earlier in Montreal, Harry Houdini had been visited backstage by a young McGill University student named J. Gordon Whitehead, who took a dim view of Houdini’s debunking crusade against Spiritualism. Whitehead asked Houdini if it were true that, as the magician often claimed, his stomach was so solid that it could sustain the hardest punches. Raising his arms, Houdini invited the young man to feel the muscles.

  Without warning, Whitehead delivered a flurry of savage blows to Houdini’s body, directly above the appendix. By that night, the fifty-two-year-old magician was suffering from agonizing abdominal pains. In spite of a temperature of 104 degrees, he performed in Detroit on Sunday, October 24, but collapsed as soon as the show was over. The following day, he was rushed to the hospital, where his ruptured appendix was removed. By Friday morning, peritonitis had developed.

  Houdini’s dire condition was front-page news everywhere in the nation, including Portland, where the Oregonian reported that physicians attending the Great Escapologist had “expressed doubts about his recovery.” It wasn’t long before those doubts were confirmed. By Sunday, Harry barely had strength to talk. “I’m tired of fighting,” he whispered to his brother, Theo. “I guess this thing is going to get me.” The next day, Monday, October 31—Halloween—the “master mystifier” passed on to the “other side,” though not before promising his beloved wife, Bess, that he would do his best to contact her from the “great beyond.”

  * * *

  The day before Houdini’s death, a Portland policeman named James Russell received a letter from his cousin, George, who lived in Santa Barbara. By a grim coincidence, this cousin was the same George Russell whose wife, Ollie, had been killed by the “Dark Strangler” the previous June. Included in the letter was a description of the suspect that had appeared in the Santa Barbara papers: “Thirty-five years old, 5 feet 8 or 10 inches tall, heavy build, especially shoulders and chest, and very dark. Said to be of Greek nativity, though speaking excellent English and to be a restaurant worker—either a cook or dishwasher—and also a construction worker.”

  As Patrolman Russell read this letter, he suddenly recalled that, while making his rounds on the previous Tuesday, he had spotted someone matching this very description in the vicinity of Mabel Fluke’s house in Sellwood. At the time, of course, Russell had thought nothing of it, but now he wondered if the man he had seen was really the “Dark Strangler.”

  Russell’s story immediately made it into the Oregonian, which published the description of the strangler suspect in its Saturday edition—too late to do any good. By that time, the elusive killer, whose escapist skills had once earned him a comparison to Houdini himself, had already vanished from the city.

>   18

  †

  Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday

  Five million words were written and sent from Somerville, New Jersey, during the first eleven days of the trial. Twice as many newspaper men were there as at Dayton …. Over wires jacked into the largest telegraph switchboard in the world traveled the tidings of lust and crime to every corner of the United States, and the public lapped them up and cried for more.

  If asked to name the most famous trial of the 1920s, most people would immediately think of Leopold and Loeb, or Sacco and Vanzetti, or possibly the so-called Dayton “Monkey Trial,” whose defendant, John T. Scopes, was found guilty of teaching evolution. For sheer sensationalism, however, none of these matched the proceedings that got underway in a New Jersey courthouse in early November 1926. The case in question was a double homicide, the most notorious since Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Borden were hacked to death by a mysterious assailant who may or may not have been their daughter, Lizzie. It would be another seventy years before a different double slaying, that of O. J. Simpson’s estranged wife and her waiter-friend, Ron Goldman, generated such frenzied fascination.

  The murders themselves had taken place four years earlier in New Brunswick, New Jersey. On the morning of September 16, 1922, a young couple strolling on a dusty back road had stumbled upon two bodies in an apple orchard. Sprawled on their backs under a crab apple tree, the corpses were those of a man and a woman. The dead man was dressed in a dark blue suit and a clerical collar. His Panama hat had been placed over his face, as though to shade him from the sun. Beside him lay the woman, her legs demurely crossed, her head resting on her companion’s outstretched right arm. She was wearing a polka-dotted blue dress, the hem tugged as far below her knees as the fabric would allow. A brown scarf had been draped over her throat. Beneath the scarf, her throat was slashed from ear to ear and was swarming with maggots. The autopsy would later reveal that her tongue, larynx, and windpipe had been cut out. She had also been shot three times in the face at point-blank range. Though the dead man had not been subjected to the same mutilations, he had been killed with chilling deliberation, executed with a single .32-caliber bullet to the brain.

  It was not the savagery of the killings that made the case so sensational, however, but rather the identity of the victims. The dead man turned out to be the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church and a pillar of the community. He was married to Mrs. Frances Hall, née Stevens, daughter of one of New Brunswick’s most prominent families. The dead woman found at his side, however, was not his matronly, forty-eight-year-old wife. She was Mrs. Eleanor Mills, a pretty thirty-four-year-old who sang in the congregation choir and was married to the church’s sexton.

  The exact nature of their relationship was made explicit in a batch of torrid love letters that had been scattered around their corpses. “Sweetheart, my true heart,” Eleanor Mills had written in one. “I know there are girls with more shapely bodies, but I’m not caring what they have. I have the greatest part of all blessings, a noble man’s deep, true, eternal love, and my heart is his, my life is his; poor as my body is, scrawny as my skin may be; but I am his forever. How impatient I am and will be! I want to look up into your dear face for hours as you touch my body close.”

  The pastor’s replies were equally ardent. “Darling Wonder Heart,” he had written. “I just want to crush you for two hours. I want to see you Friday night alone by our road; where we can let out, unrestrained, that universe of joy and happiness we call ours.” He signed himself “D.T.L.,” short for Deiner Treuer Liebhaber (“Thy True Lover” in German). Mrs. Mills, preferring a less formal endearment, referred to the pastor as “Babykins.”

  This steaming porridge of sex, murder, and scandal proved irresistible to the tabloids, which began dishing up great, daily gobs to their readers. New Brunswick was overrun with reporters. The nationwide coverage turned the old Phillips farm, where the bodies were found, into a major tourist attraction. On weekends the crime scene became a virtual carnival with vendors hawking popcorn, peanuts, soft drinks, and balloons to the hordes of the morbidly curious.

  After two months of investigation, the killer’s identity remained unknown, though the likeliest candidates were the pastor’s wronged wife and her two brothers, one of whom was reputed to be a crack shot. When Mrs. Hall—a wealthy socialite with many powerful friends in the community—let it be known that she wanted the circus to end, a grand jury was quickly convened. After five days of hearings, it failed to issue an indictment. Mrs. Hall promptly set sail for Europe, and the nation was compelled to seek its titillation elsewhere.

  Four years later, however, in a bid to boost its circulation, William Randolph Hearst’s fledgling tabloid the New York Daily Mirror dredged up some new evidence in the case and plastered the front page of its July 16, 1926, edition with a sensational headline: HALL-MILLS MURDER MYSTERY BARED. Over the course of the following week, the tabloid trumpeted one frenzied charge after another: HALL’S BRIBERY REVEALED, MRS. HALL’S SPIES HELD TOWN IN TERROR, HOW HIDDEN HAND BALKED HALL MURDER JUSTICE.

  The strategy worked. Not only did the Mirror’s circulation jump, but its strident calls for action forced the governor of New Jersey to reopen the case. Finally, on July 28, 1926, Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall—along with her brothers, Willie and Henry—was arrested for the murder of her husband, Edward, and his inamorata, Mrs. Eleanor Mills.

  “The Trial of the Century” (as it was immediately dubbed by the press) began on the morning of Wednesday, November 3, 1926, in Somerville, New Jersey. The courthouse was crammed with hundreds of reporters, who would file more than twelve million words during the trial’s spectacular twenty-three-day run. The notoriously stodgy New York Times, which normally sniffed at such lurid matters, not only kept four full-time stenographers on the scene but actually covered the case more extensively than the tabloids. (When asked about this seeming contradiction, publisher Adolph S. Ochs loftily replied, “The yellows see such stories only as opportunities for sensationalism. When the Times gives a great amount of space to such stories, it turns out authentic sociological documents.”) Among the celebrity spectators were evangelist Billy Sunday (whose campaign against “Demon Rum” had helped bring about Prohibition); novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart; and legendary newsman Damon Runyan.

  The trial offered more than its share of melodramatic moments, including the public reading of the Reverend Hall’s steamy love letters; the questioning of Mrs. Hall (nicknamed “The Iron Widow” because of her stolid demeanor); and—most sensationally—the testimony of a purported eyewitness, a farmwife named Jane Gibson, dubbed “The Pig Woman” because she raised Poland China hogs. Dying of cancer, Mrs. Gibson, attended by a doctor and two nurses, was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher and placed on an iron hospital bed facing the jury box. During her testimony—a gripping (if highly dubious) account of the grisly double murder—her own aged mother sat in the front row of the gallery, wringing her gnarled hands and muttering, “She’s a liar! She’s a liar! She’s a liar!”

  For three solid weeks, the dramatic doings in Somerville kept the whole country in thrall. Every morning, Americans followed the case in their daily papers as though devouring the latest installment of the world’s juiciest potboiler. During the height of the Hall-Mills hysteria, only the most extraordinary news could dislodge the trial from the headlines or distract the public from the sensational proceedings, from the Iron Widow’s steely testimony and the Pig Woman’s shocking tale.

  In the end, the jury would believe the former over the latter. Mrs. Hall and her brothers would be acquitted of the charges (and would promptly sue the Mirror for three million dollars). Before that happened, however, something extraordinary did take place in San Francisco—something so purely alarming that, when it made the headlines on November 19, even the Pig Woman’s riveting story was relegated to second place.

  Almost three months had passed since the murder of Mary Nisbet, the last of the strangler
’s Bay Area victims. During that time, occasional scare stories would appear in the papers—reports of women who had been attacked in their homes, ostensibly by the strangler.

  In late October, for example, the Chronicle ran a piece about Mrs. Josephine Allen, a thirty-four-year-old war widow who rented rooms in her house at 1463 Post Street. On the morning of October 26, a strange man appeared at her front door and asked to see a room. No sooner had Mrs. Allen led him up to the second floor than he suddenly seized her by the throat and began choking her. Putting up a fierce struggle, Mrs. Allen managed to break free and dash for the staircase. But her assailant overtook her, and the two began to grapple again at the head of the stairs.

  The noise attracted one of the tenants, a Filipino man named Cruz Marcuse, who poked his head out of his room. Spotting him, the stranger shoved Mrs. Allen aside, then whipped a straight razor from his pocket and came at Marcuse, who ducked back into his room and slammed the door.

  Mrs. Allen, meanwhile, had stumbled down the stairs and made for the telephone. She had just been connected to the station house when the stranger came bolting down the stairs and out the front door. By the time the police arrived, he was long gone.

  Just a few days later, at around eight in the evening, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Glady Mullins stepped out of her house to deposit some trash in her backyard garbage bin. Suddenly, she was seized from behind. Powerful hands clapped a gag to her mouth and began binding her arms with a length of rope. At that moment, however, her next-door neighbor, Frank Hicks—who was just arriving home from his job-pulled his car into the alleyway between the two houses. In the glare of his headlights, he saw Mrs. Mullins lying on the ground, a hulking figure looming above er. As Hicks jumped from his car, the stranger turned, leapt over the backyard fence, and vanished into the night.