Thomas Piper was born on April 22, 1849, in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where he worked with his father as a carpenter and on a farm that the family kept.25 He joined his family in Boston in 1866, occasionally working with his father, but aspiring to better things. He apparently was literate and clever, and he took several clerking jobs, including work as a researcher on a directory of prominent businessmen in Boston. He was a churchgoing Baptist and volunteered at Sunday school at several churches in Boston. But there was an incipient dark side to Piper. He frequently changed jobs and had been dismissed from several positions for “dishonesty.”
Piper also had a secret addiction to opium tincture—laudanum—which he would mix into whiskey as “treatment” for his kidney disorder. With a strength of 1 percent morphine, laudanum was an over-the-counter drugstore product, completely legal and unregulated. But it was highly addictive and, when mixed with whiskey, potentially hallucinogenic. Unknown to police as well, Piper was compulsively committing acts of arson, including the fire near his home on the night of Bridget Landregan’s murder.26
In the previous winter, he signed up on a ship as a sailor and was away at sea until his return to Boston in August. Because a witness had reported the fleeing suspect as having a “sailor’s gait” police began to get interested in Piper.
It is as frequent in serial-killer cases today as it was back then to find that when a serial killer is eventually apprehended he had already been interviewed as a suspect or a “person of interest.” Ted Bundy, Peter Sutcliffe, Paul Bernardo and Gary Ridgway are particularly notorious examples of police having the needle already in their haystack of suspect files when the case is broken. Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper,” murdered thirteen women over a six-year period, all the while police questioned him on twelve separate occasions.27
In Piper’s time, the science of forensic-evidence gathering was still in its early stages. Fingerprint identification would not come into use until 1891, when the first conviction based on fingerprints left at a crime scene was reached in a murder case in Argentina.28 As far as DNA identification goes, that would have to wait until 1986, when it was first used in court in Britain.29 Despite their suspicions, Boston police could not secure enough evidence to charge Piper, and when they discovered that Landregan had a jealous Irish suitor who had sailed to Ireland shortly after her murder, they arranged for the Irishman’s arrest and extradition back to the United States. The process would take months, during which Piper was forgotten as a suspect.
Thomas W. Piper was the “perfect storm” of psychopathy. On the surface he wore a mask: the dutiful, hardworking son; the gracefully elegant young gentleman, eligible bachelor, pious churchgoer and Sunday-school volunteer. In April 1874, he would be hired as a church sexton and given the keys to the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, a massive building with a five-story-tall bell tower in the Columbus district of Boston (on the current site of James Hayes Park at Warren Avenue and West Canton Street).
Piper’s duties included unlocking the church in the morning, firing up its six furnaces, setting out chairs and books for various events and services and assisting with the general maintenance of the building before locking up for the night. But behind the mask of respectable sanity was a raging, laudanum-drinking arsonist, petty thief and sex addict. Piper would often use his keys to sleep overnight in the church on a couch in the vestry, claiming that it was easier for him to fire up the furnaces early in the morning by staying overnight rather than returning home. A frequent customer of Boston’s red-light district, Piper was on at least one occasion reprimanded for bringing a prostitute to the vestry, and after his final arrest, police would discover a stash of whiskey, opium and ether that he kept hidden in the church.30
On July 1, 1874, Piper took a hammer from the Warren Avenue church and proceeded to engage the services of prostitute Mary Tynan. She took him to her tenement at 34 Oxford Street, where they spent the night together. Early in the morning, as she slept, Piper struck her on the head with the hammer and then slipped out a window without being seen. According to his confession afterward, he returned to the Warren Avenue church, washed the hammer and scraped the dried blood off with a penknife and buried it in the church basement.31
Tynan was found in her blood-soaked bed in a semiconscious state and her jealous boyfriend, a woodworker who could not account for a missing hammer among his tools, was arrested for her assault but later released. Tynan, although she did not succumb to her injuries, remained incoherent and could not remember or identify her assailant. Her cerebral condition worsened, and within the year, she was hospitalized in a mental facility. (She was found dead in a Pitt Street hotel in 1889.)32 As far as it is known, nobody in the Boston police thought of linking the hammer attack on Tynan with the murder of Bridget Landregan the previous December, especially as the police had identified other suspects in both cases. Even today, considering that Landregan had been ambushed in the street by a stranger, while Tynan had been battered inside her own apartment by somebody she knew or at least brought home with her, investigators might hesitate to link the two cases together.
Almost a year later, on Sunday, May 23, 1875, at approximately two p.m., Augusta Hobbs brought her five-year-old niece, Mabel Young, a pretty and precocious girl, to the Warren Avenue Baptist Church for Sunday school. On arriving at the church, little Mabel ran up to the sexton, Thomas Piper, in the vestibule and greeted him with a friendly hello. Augusta saw him stoop down and whisper something to the girl before she ran off to her class.
Augusta frequently taught Sunday school herself but on this day she took a desk near Mabel and sat in on the class. Just before it began, she noticed Piper standing in the doorway staring at her and Mabel. Augusta attempted to speak to Piper twice, but he walked away blankly and did not respond.
The class ended at three thirty p.m., and kids and their parents congregated in different parts of the church. As Augusta stood in the vestibule talking with another member of the congregation, she lost sight of Mabel. When five minutes later it came time to leave, Mabel was nowhere to be found.
A frantic search for Mabel now began inside the church and in the surrounding streets.
Suddenly the searchers outside the church heard a child’s moaning emanating from the belfry. They rushed into the church to ask the sexton to unlock the doors leading to the belfry; some saw him at that moment sauntering in through a side door from the street, while other people testified that they saw him at a kitchen door with the pulpit pitcher in his hand and still others saw him setting up chairs in an assembly hall. In the frenzied search for the girl, witnesses lost track of time and place.
Several people rushed up to Piper, telling him that a child was trapped in the belfry and crying out, but he dismissed the idea, saying, “Impossible,” that the doors had not been unlocked in six months. Several people demanded that he show them to the belfry door, which he did, but he fell behind, dragging his feet. As people tried the belfry door and found it locked, Piper remained behind them, watching from a lower stair landing. He said he would have to go back and look for the key to the doors, but he quickly returned, claiming he could not find the key. Piper told another witness asking about the key that “there were boys who have the key that opens the tower,” and that perhaps he had left the key in the door when he recently went up there to clean out the pigeon droppings, contradicting his earlier statement that he had not been up there in at least six months. A locksmith would later testify that six weeks earlier, Piper had come in with the bell tower key, demanding urgently that he make a copy of it for him.
Approximately fifteen minutes after the girl went missing, a congregant used a pair of pliers to remove the door from its hinges, and several men rushed up the belfry stairs. At the second level, the so-called bell deck, a ladder led up to a trapdoor that opened to the “pigeon loft” under the peak of the tower. They made their way up the ladder, pushed open the trapdoor and found the unconscious Mabel
lying on her back, a minute amount of blood at her nostrils. The girl was quickly bundled away in a carriage and taken home, and doctors were summoned. The assumption was that she had fallen while exploring the tower.
As police began to arrive and excited parishioners gathered, there was a general sense of annoyance with the sexton. Why was he unable to produce the key for the bell tower? Moreover, how was it that the girl was found on the other side of a locked door?
Searchers congregating on the bell deck, one level below the pigeon loft where the girl was found, lifted a scrap of newspaper from the floor and discovered a palm-sized pool of still-wet blood. The underside of the newspaper was stained with blood, not as if it had soaked up the blood from the floor but as if it had been used to wipe the blood off something. A police officer then noticed a loose floorboard. When he lifted it up he discovered an ash-wood cricket bat, two feet, six inches long, an inch and a sixteenth thick, weighing one pound and seven ounces.33 (Baseball was still in its infancy and cricket was the game in Boston.) One of the parishioners was surprised at the sight of the bat because three hours earlier he had seen a cricket bat leaning up against the church library wall behind a door. He ran downstairs to look and ascertained that the bat he had seen was no longer there. When he mentioned this to Piper, Piper replied that there were many bats around the church, but none could be produced.
In the meantime, it began to dawn on people that had the girl been injured falling she would have been found on a lower level, not on the top level of the pigeon loft. Slowly people’s gazes began to shift to the sexton. Several would remark that he seemed aloof and “disinterested” in what was transpiring. He stood apart from the milling crowd, quietly leaning against a closed door. Then Chief of Police Savage arrived at the scene. It wasn’t long before the chief wanted to speak with the custodian of the premises. When he was directed to Piper, he immediately recognized the young man who had been a suspect in the bludgeoning murder of Bridget Landregan two years previously: Thomas W. Piper. It was one hell of a coincidence.
Savage approached Piper and immediately took from his hand a ring of keys. Piper was “invited” to accompany the police to a station house, where his clothes were taken from him and bagged as evidence and he was locked up. That Sunday evening, Savage returned to the church and began trying the lock in the bell tower door with the keys on the ring taken from Piper. Two of the keys worked in the lock; Piper had the keys all along.
In the meantime, Dr. B. E. Cotting, a physician from Harvard Medical School, arrived at Mabel’s home and examined the girl. He immediately concluded that she was suffering from severe blunt trauma to the back of her head. Mabel Young died early the next morning without regaining consciousness. Cotting would conduct a historic (for its advanced wound-to-weapon comparison techniques) autopsy and determined that the girl had not been injured in a fall. Nor, as Piper eventually claimed, did she die accidentally when he took her up to the tower to “see the birdies” and the trapdoor, which he said he had propped open with the cricket bat, slipped and struck the girl on the head.34 Cotting determined that the injuries to Mabel’s skull had been deliberately inflicted with a blow from an object precisely shaped like a cricket bat.
Despite the evidence, it was not going to be an easy conviction. Two witnesses testified that they observed a man matching Piper’s description exiting a lower window in the bell tower, dropping to the church grounds twelve feet below and reentering the church. One of the witnesses had a long criminal record and the other witness was a woman in an apartment with a view of the church 420 feet away. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, but Piper was convicted in the second trial, and sentenced to death by hanging.
On the eve of his execution, he confessed that since his return to Boston, he had been experiencing compulsions to rape and kill. On December 5, 1873, the day of Bridget Landregan’s murder, he had gone to church in the evening with his two brothers but had sneaked away, purchased laudanum and whiskey and gotten high. He then went home, sawed off the piece of wagon shaft and hid it outside, underneath a fence, then set fire to a store nearby and watched the action in a state of excitement with his brothers and several friends. He was at his front steps when he saw the servant girl Bridget Landregan walking on the other side of the street. He went into the house, telling his brothers he was tired and going to bed, and then sneaked out the basement door in the back, retrieved the improvised wooden club and caught up with Landregan and followed her, intending to knock her unconscious and rape her.35 When he found his opportunity, he struck her down but was interrupted before he could commit the rape.
He claimed disingenuously that he assaulted the prostitute Mary Tynan with a hammer to take back the money he had given her, and he drew for the police a map to the location where he buried the murder weapon in the church basement. The police successfully located it.
In the case of Mabel Young he claimed he was under a compulsion to kill a child, any child, and was in a delusional state from consuming laudanum and whiskey the previous night and from drinking or huffing ether (newspapers said “chloroform”). He stated that he lured the girl into the tower by offering to show her baby birds and then struck her twice with the bat. Contrary to the witness reports of him leaping out the window, Piper stated he slipped out the bell tower door and locked it behind him without anybody catching sight of him.36
The likely scenario is that Piper had developed a necrophilic compulsion to have sex with unconscious victims. He had intended to render his first known victim, Landregan, unconscious to sexually assault her; he likely raped the prostitute Mary Tynan after knocking her unconscious with the hammer; and it was probably his intention to do the same with Mabel, or to stash her corpse in the belfry so that he could return that night and engage in necrophilic sex with her. His plan went wrong when he failed to kill the girl and she convulsed and moaned so loudly that people in the street heard her cries.
Some contemporary newspaper accounts claim that Piper also confessed to the rape-murder of a twelve-year-old girl and the rape of a woman named Minnie Sullivan on Dennis Street the same night he killed Bridget Landregan, but neither of these two incidents appears in any searchable police records.37
Thomas W. Piper was executed on May 26, 1876.
Theodore “Theo” Durrant, the “Demon of the Belfry”—San Francisco, 1895
In a weird, synchronous footnote to the Boston belfry murder, nineteen years later, in 1895—slightly out of chronological order here, occurring after Jack the Ripper—another Canadian-born necrophile serial killer in the US, Theodore “Theo” Durrant, the “Demon of the Belfry,” murdered and raped two women inside San Francisco’s Bartlett Street Emanuel Baptist Church, where, like Piper in Boston, he too was a sexton.
A promising medical student at the Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, the twenty-five-year-old Durrant was a church sexton and taught Sunday school. In April 1895, he lured to the church a congregant he had been courting, twenty-year-old Blanche Lamont, and murdered her in the library. He then dragged her body up to the belfry. (Police found traces of her hair trapped in the splinters of the stairs.) He kept her naked corpse hidden on the bell deck of the belfry for two weeks, her head propped up with “corpse blocks,” which he took from his school’s anatomy department and which were designed to slow down the decomposition of a corpse.38 An assortment of female clothing was later found in the belfry near the corpse. Presumably Durrant was dressing his victim like a doll during bouts of necrophilic sex, while at the same time visiting her family and assisting in the search for the missing woman. The affable and handsome Durrant commented to the family that Blanche was innocent and impressionable and might have been lured away into white slavery.
When after ten days Lamont’s vagina had become infested with maggots, Durrant lost interest in her corpse. On Good Friday he lured twenty-one-year-old Minnie Flora Williams, another church member he had been courting, into the church and murder
ed and raped her. The next day, as women volunteers were preparing the church for Easter, one of the women found Williams’s mutilated body stuffed in a closet of the church library. She had been strangled and stabbed, slashed on the head and face, and her wrists cut so deeply that the hands were almost severed from the body. Material torn from her undergarments had been shoved down her throat with a sharp stick. That discovery led to the subsequent discovery of Lamont’s body in the bell tower, lying on her back, her hands folded over her chest.
Witnesses reported seeing the victims with Theodore Durrant shortly before each murder, and he was quickly arrested, tried and convicted of the two murders. Durrant never confessed, and he insisted on his innocence to the end. After he was arrested, several of Durrant’s female Sunday school students came forward to report that before the murders Durrant had lewdly propositioned them; some reported that he had “ambushed” them stark naked in the library. There were also reports that Durrant frequented prostitutes, bringing with him a sack of live birds whose throats he would cut and cover himself in their blood while having sex.39
Durrant inspired perhaps the first reported instance of serial-killer “groupies.” One of several young women infatuated with the “handsome-in-a-dark-sort-of-way” serial killer came to the trial bearing bouquets of sweet pea flowers for him. She became known as the “Sweet Pea Girl.”40
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