Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Soon afterwards, she called another friend, Mrs. S. P. Brautigan of 4419 Dayton Avenue. During this conversation, Mrs. Monks mentioned that she was expecting a visit later in the day from a fellow lodge member named J. M. Coy.

  Mrs. Monks’ neighbors were a couple named Edward and Anna McDonald. At around noon on Tuesday, Mrs. McDonald glanced out her kitchen window and saw a “shabby-looking” automobile pull up in front of the house next door. A tall, thin, gray-haired man—dressed in a wrinkled gray suit and threadbare raincoat—emerged from the car, climbed the front-porch steps, and rang Mrs. Monks’ bell. Seconds later, Mrs. Monks came to the door and, after exchanging a few words with the stranger, let him in. Mrs. McDonald, assuming the man was there to see the house, returned to her cooking.

  Approximately one hour later, a couple named Carpenter arrived to view the property. They were admitted by Mrs. Monks, who proceeded to lead them on a tour of the house, beginning in the basement, then moving up to the first-floor rooms. They were just about to ascend to the second story when the doorbell rang. Excusing herself, Mrs. Monks hurried to the door and admitted a tall, blond man with a ruddy face and the air and appearance of a laborer. When they departed about twenty minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter noticed the man seated in a small room off the main hallway waiting to speak with Mrs. Monks.

  Whatever business the blond man had with Mrs. Monks must have been concluded by 2:30 P.M. That was when she telephoned her caterer, Otto Kirchbach of the Art Bake Shop, to discuss arrangements for a party she was planning for sixty members of the Order of Amaranth. It was scheduled for December 4 at the Rainier Masonic Temple.

  “It was to be very elaborate,” Kirchbach later recalled. “I had bought turkeys and other things for it, and she wanted the turkeys carved in front of the guests. She also asked me to change her order for punch to one for cider and to supply small raisins.”

  After about fifteen minutes, Mrs. Monks suddenly broke off the conversation. “I’ve got to go now, Otto,” she said, interrupting him in the middle of a sentence. “There’s someone at the door.” Bidding him goodbye, she hung up the phone.

  Later, Kirchbach would wonder if that “someone” had been Mrs. Monks’ killer.

  At approximately 8:00 P.M. that evening, J. M. Coy, Mrs. Monks’ fellow lodge member, showed up as promised to discuss the plans for the big dinner party. He rang the bell again and again. But much to his surprise, Mrs. Monks did not respond.

  Proceeding to a nearby drugstore, he called her from a pay phone but got no answer. He returned to the house and walked all around it. The windows were dark. Puzzled, Mr. Coy headed back to his house.

  At around 6:00 P.M. the following evening, Wednesday, November 23, 1926, Edward McDonald looked out his parlor window and saw a middle-aged couple standing on the front porch of Mrs. Monks’ house. The man, who wore an angry scowl, was pounding on the door. Mr. McDonald went out to investigate.

  The man, who gave his name as Hansen, explained that he and his wife had called Mrs. Monks the previous week and made an appointment to inspect the house. They had come a long way and were much put out to find that she was not there.

  Since Mrs. Monks spent only part of each week in the city, she had arranged for McDonald to show the house when she wasn’t there. Fetching his key, McDonald let the couple inside and began to lead them around the premises, but the house was clearly not to their liking. Before they had finished viewing the first floor, Mr. Hansen announced that he and his wife had seen enough. Thanking McDonald for his trouble, the couple departed.

  McDonald headed back to his own house, wondering where Mrs. Monks had gone. It was completely unlike her to forget an appointment. He could only surmise that she had been called away on an urgent matter.

  About an hour later, however, it occurred to him to check her garage. The instant he saw her car parked inside it, he grew worried. Clearly, Mrs. Monks could not have gone very far. Perhaps something had happened to her. He knew that she suffered from dizzy spells. She might be lying unconscious somewhere in the house.

  Hurrying to the home of another neighbor, a man named B. E. Gordon, McDonald explained his concern. The two men proceeded to Mrs. Monks’ house and made a quick search of the premises, beginning in the attic and working their way down to the cellar. McDonald, who had never been in the cellar after dusk, couldn’t find the light switch. Striking a match, he and Gordon peered around the dank, musty room, empty except for the big, silent furnace that loomed in the shadows. But they saw no sign of the widow.

  At approximately 8:00 P.M., however—less than an hour after the two men had given up and gone back to their homes—someone else showed up at Mrs. Monks’ front door, Thomas J. Raymond, the caretaker of her country estate. He had been trying to contact his employer by telephone since the previous evening. Raymond, too, knew about Mrs. Monks’ heart condition and, fearing that some accident had befallen her, had driven down from Echo Lake to investigate.

  After receiving no response to his insistent knocking, he let himself into the house with an emergency key and quickly searched the first floor. Inside the kitchen, he discovered a whole loaf of bread, an untouched marble cake, and a wilting bunch of celery—provisions for a meal Mrs. Monks had obviously never gotten around to eating.

  The house was largely devoid of furniture, most of it having been removed in anticipation of the sale. The only exception was Mrs. Monks’ second-floor bedroom. Switching on the electric light, Raymond was startled to see something that McDonald and Gordon had mysteriously overlooked. The bureau drawers had been opened and apparently ransacked, as had the closet. But Mrs. Monks was nowhere to be seen.

  Raymond made his way down to the cellar. Unlike McDonald, he had no trouble finding the light switch. As soon as he clicked it on, his heart constricted with alarm. Something heavy had been dragged across the dirt floor. There was a trail leading from the foot of the stairs to the rear of the furnace.

  Even before he crossed the floor and peered behind the furnace, Raymond knew what he would find. When his worst fears were confirmed, he spun on his heels, bolted back up the staircase, and made a frantic call to the police.

  The murder of Florence Monks was a milestone in the “Dark Strangler” case. Not only did it cause an uproar in Seattle, but it even made the pages of the New York Times, which ran a half-column story about the slaying on Friday, November 26. For the first time, the strangler case was national news.

  Not that everyone assumed that the wealthy widow had been slain by the “Dark Strangler.” Indeed, like the recent “trunk-death” case in Portland, the killing of Mrs. Monks set off a highly public controversy among local authorities.

  To be sure, the crime bore obvious parallels to previous strangler murders—an aging landlady killed in “lonely surroundings” (as the Seattle Times put it), her body stuffed into a cramped, concealed space. Other aspects of the case, however, seemed to depart from the pattern. For one thing, it wasn’t at all clear that Mrs. Monks had died of strangulation. True, there were finger marks on her throat. She had obviously been choked. But there was also (as Coroner Willis H. Corson told reporters) “a large contusion on her head, resulting in a hemorrhage between the scalp and skull.” Corson, who was openly skeptical of the “strangler” theory, believed that Mrs. Monks may have been bludgeoned to death, possibly with a coal shovel found a few feet away from her body. Given her heart condition, it was also conceivable that she had died of shock.

  The postmortem conducted the following day seemed to bolster Corson’s position. As the newpapers delicately put it, “the examination failed to disclose the slightest evidence that the woman had been subjected to any indignity.” Evidently, as Corson asserted at a press conference Friday evening, robbery—“not lust”—was the motive for the crime.

  His theory received additional support when police ascertained that, shortly before her murder, Mrs. Monks had emptied her safety deposit box at the Seattle National Bank of all its contents, including a collection
of diamond rings, pins, and bracelets appraised at somewhere between four and five thousand dollars. Besides the jewelry he had stripped from Mrs. Monks’ body, the killer had apparently made off with these valuables, too—a fact which suggested not only that he was “actuated by greed” (as Corson insisted) but that he was someone with “an intimate knowledge of the widow’s habits.”

  Over the next few days, detectives focussed their attention on several suspects, primarily the gray-haired man who had driven up to Mrs. Monks’ house on the day of the murder and the blond, ruddy-faced laborer who had dropped by while the Carpenters were touring the premises. But both men had airtight alibis. So did J. M. Coy, Mrs. Monks’ fellow member of the Order of Amaranth lodge, who fell briefly under suspicion but was quickly cleared.

  That left the police with only one tantalizing lead, provided by Louise Baker, Mrs. Monks’ niece. Several weeks earlier—according to Mrs. Baker—a “dark, round-faced stranger” had appeared at her aunt’s door holding “some kind of a paper which had Mrs. Monks’ name on it.” Just as the widow was about to close the door on him, the stranger “asked her if she lived there alone, and she told him that it was none of his business and slammed the door in his face.”

  When Mrs. Monks had recounted this story, Mrs. Baker had remonstrated with her aunt. “It is dangerous for you to spend so much time in that big house all by yourself. Particularly with so much valuable jewelry in your possession.” But Mrs. Monks had only laughed at her niece’s fears.

  For Captain of Detectives Charles Tennant, the Monks case was a grim object lesson in the perils of female preening. At a press conference on Friday afternoon, he vented his scorn at the vanity of women like Mrs. Monks, suggesting that if anyone was to blame for her death, it was the victim herself. Her fate, he declared, should stand as a warning to others.

  “‘Come and take them!’ That’s what these women are saying to every cut-purse and sneak thief that comes along,” said Tennant, his voice edged with contempt. “They load themselves up with a lot of bar pins, diamond sunbursts, and expensive rings—an open and never-failing invitation to some crook to help himself. In New York City alone there are scores of such women robbed every day, many of them killed. We have been fortunate here, but the woman who is known to carry large amounts of gems around with her, as Mrs. Monks did, is never safe.”

  Some of Tennant’s colleagues, however, including Chief William H. Searing, had a very diferent view of the matter. Taking issue not only with Tennant but with Coroner Corson as well, Searing declared his conviction that the slayer of Mrs. Monks was the same “fiend” who had already killed a string of landladies in San Francisco and Portland.

  “There is no question in my mind,” he told reporters, “but that the man we’re looking for is the same criminal who has had such uncanny success in covering up his tracks in California and Portland. The methods of working are exactly parallel with the procedure in the murder of Mrs. Monks.” Searing went on to describe the suspect, “the most cunning and cold-blooded killer in the annals of Pacific Coast crime,” as a killer “whose perverted senses delight in the throttling of helpless women. He speaks good English, is ingratiating in the extreme, is of vigorous constitution, brawny of build although fairly short of stature, and has the smooth olive complexion of a man of Italian or Serbian descent.”

  When a reporter raised the question of the coroner’s findings—Dr. Corson’s conclusion that Mrs. Monks, unlike the strangler’s previous victims, had not been sexually violated—Searing simply shrugged and said, “I don’t take much stock in these scientific reports.”

  His belief that the “Dark Strangler” had killed Mrs. Monks was bolstered by Detective Archie Leonard of Portland, who arrived in Seattle on Saturday, November 27, to aid with the investigation. After conferring with Searing and other officials, Leonard met with newsmen and announced that he was “greatly impressed by the similarity between the murder of Mrs. Monks and the slaying of three Portland women last month. In every case, the murderer entered a house that was either for sale or for rent. The victim was between forty-five and sixty years of age and was alone in the house when the slayer called. Jewels were also taken in one of the three Portland cases.”

  For the next few days, the controversy over the Monks case continued to rage. Had the aging widow been murdered by a jewel thief or by the strangler who had been prowling the Pacific Coast for months, preying on unwary landladies?

  Even a visiting performer found a way to get in on the act. On Monday, November 29, nineteen-year-old Eugenia Dennis, billed as the “Amazing Girl Psychic,” arrived from Kansas for a week-long engagement at Seattle’s Coliseum Theatre. Miss Dennis’ telepathic powers had brought her international renown. No less a celebrity than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had proclaimed her “the eighth wonder of the world.”

  On the afternoon of her arrival, a reporter for the Seattle Times came to interview her in her dressing room, where—in the presence of her manager, William “Billy” Morrison—he asked her about the “Monks murder mystery.”

  Without having read or heard anything about the case—so she maintained—Miss Dennis immediately asked, “Wasn’t she a middle-aged woman?”

  “That is correct,” exclaimed the reporter.

  Shutting her eyes, the Amazing Girl Psychic remained silent for a long moment, her brow furrowed in intense concentration. Suddenly she began to speak in a deep, unfaltering voice: “I see a tall, rather heavy-set, dark man. His eyebrows are conspicuous. He had admired her very much, but they had a quarrel. She is holding a box in her hand. It has a lot of money in it.

  “I can see him standing outside a cellar door. Was there a cellar in the house? Yes, he carried her in the cellar to where it is dark. He came out the front door later. It must have happened around six o’clock. He has her jewels and a lot more money than anyone now supposes.

  “I see him go to a boat where he gives a man a package containing the jewels. They are taken to Canada. Yes, they are still in Canada. The man has the money in his pocket. He still is carrying it.”

  Informed of Miss Dennis’ assertion that the killer of Mrs. Monks was an acquaintance who stole her jewels and sold them to a Canadian fence, Chief Searing responded with a derisive snort. Mrs. Monks’ killer was no thief, he repeated, but a “degenerate”—the same “beast-man strangler” who had recently slain the three Portland women.

  “In none of these cases was murder necessary,” Searing insisted. “There was no necessity of killing Mrs. Monks. There was none in any of the Portland cases. It is simply that the killer took delight in his work. He did not kill for profit. He killed for the satisfaction it gave him.”

  20

  †

  Blanche Myers

  If you ever find me lying dead, please don’t take my body up to the morgue.

  The doorbell rang a few minutes past noon, Monday, November 29, 1926. Excusing herself, Blanche Myers rose from the table and headed for the front entryway, leaving the kitchen door slightly ajar.

  Her lunch guest, Alexander Muir, remained seated at his place, finishing off his plateful of liver and eggs. Though the kitchen was just down the hall from the entryway, the house, located at 449 Tenth Street in Portland, was of such solid, thick-walled construction that Muir could barely make out Mrs. Myers’ voice as she spoke to the caller—obviously a male, judging from the muffled words spoken in reply.

  Using a chunk of pumpernickel to swab his plate clean, Muir washed down the bread with the last of his coffee. Then, settling back in his chair, he removed a cigar from his shirt pocket, bit off the end, and lit it with a long wooden match.

  The tidy, two-story house belonged to Muir, who leased it to Blanche Myers, who in turn rented out the two spare rooms on the second floor. She had begun taking in lodgers four years earlier when her husband, Frederick, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving her with two adolescent boys to raise. At the moment, the smaller of the spare bedrooms was vacant,
and Mrs. Myers had placed a “Room to Rent” sign in the front-parlor window facing Tenth Street.

  Muir, a balding, broad-shouldered man in his thirties, had come by that morning to do some repair work on the roof of his property. Afterwards, Mrs. Myers had invited him to stay for lunch. Muir, himself recently widowered, was only too glad to accept. He enjoyed spending time in Mrs. Myers’ company, liked chatting with her, liked looking at her. At forty-eight, she was still a strikingly handsome woman with thick, dark hair, almond eyes, a soft, full-lipped mouth, and a dimpled chin he found entrancing.

  Muir was almost halfway through his smoke before Mrs. Myers reappeared in the kitchen, around fifteen minutes later. Reaching out her cupped right hand, she dumped a bunch of big silver coins onto the checkered oilcloth covering the table. Muir put out a finger and counted the change, seven silver half dollars in all.

  “Just found a renter for that empty room,” Mrs. Myers said, reseating herself across from her visitor. Nodding at the $3.50, she added, “Paid a week in advance.”

  “Who is he?” Muir asked, puffing on his stogie.

  “Some fellow that came by last Saturday, asking about the room. Looks like a logger.”

  Muir’s brow wrinkled. “Funny for a logger to take a room so far uptown. He a drinking man?”

  “I asked,” said Mrs. Myers. Raising her cup to her mouth, she sipped and made a face. Her coffee had gone tepid since she’d left the room. “Said he did, but only a little now and then. Seems respectable enough.”

  The lodger had decided to lie down for a nap, Mrs. Myers explained. Muir hung around for another five minutes or so, then, after checking his pocket watch, rose from the table, thanked his hostess for the meal, and departed. By then, it was nearly 1:00 P.M.

  Sometime within the next hour (according to the coroner’s subsequent estimate), Mrs. Muir was evidently summoned to the second-floor room by her new tenant. She must have still been in the kitchen when he called, perhaps cleaning up after lunch, since her pink tea apron was on when she entered his room.