Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Theodore Durrant was executed on January 7, 1898, at San Quentin Prison.

  His younger sister, Beulah Maude Durrant, was the noted American actress, dancer and choreographer Maud Allan (1873–1956).

  The “Servant-Girl Annihilator”—Austin, Texas, 1885

  A still-unidentified perpetrator murdered seven women (five African-American and two white) and a black male in Austin, Texas, between 1884 and 1885. The victims were all attacked while asleep in their beds. Five of the women were dragged unconscious outdoors and killed there, three of them severely mutilated. Some of the victims were sexually assaulted and their heads cleaved open with an ax. Six of the victims were posed with a sharp object driven into their brain and protruding from their ears. Although the homicides were called the “servant-girl murders,” two victims were housewives, one was a male and another a child. It’s likely that the press latched onto this label because of the frequency of servant-girl murders over the century. The murders terrified Austin for an entire year, after which they inexplicably stopped. A 2014 episode of PBS’s History Detectives, in which current psychological profiling and geoforensic profiling techniques were used, suggested that the perpetrator was a nineteen-year-old African-American cook named Nathan Elgin, who was shot dead by police in February 1886 during a knife assault on a girl.41 This claim immediately sparked overenthusiastic claims that Elgin was “the first serial killer in the United States.”42

  If we go by the traditional three-or-more-victims definition, then Thomas Piper was America’s first sexual serial killer; if we go by the more recent two-victims-or-more definition, then Jesse Pomeroy was. Both H. H. Holmes and the “Servant-Girl Annihilator” arrived on the scene too late to be America’s “first.”

  NINE

  Slouching Toward Whitechapel: Sex Crimes in Britain Before Jack the Ripper

  Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot.

  —JOURNAL ENTRY, CHILD KILLER FREDERICK BAKER, 1867

  Baker was not mad. He was simply a monster.

  —POLICE NEWS, LONDON, 1867

  We are now approaching the Jack the Ripper case in 1888. But we are not there yet. Considering how many notorious serial killers Britain would contribute in the twentieth century, it’s remarkable that there were no known sexual-lust serial killers prior to Jack the Ripper in the way they crop up in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the US, as chronicled above. The legendary Sweeney Todd, the “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in London who cut his customers’ throats with a razor and tipped their bodies out of their chair down a chute into the basement of the barbershop, is just that: a legend. And a Broadway show.1 The case of the Sawney Bean cannibal clan that supposedly killed a thousand victims in Scotland, salting some of the corpses for winter feeding, is apparently as much a myth as Sweeney Todd although not yet a Broadway show.2 Sawney Bean is an artifact of a sixteenth-century The Hills Have Eyes/The Texas Chainsaw Massacre brand of war propaganda disseminated during England’s conquest of the northlands. Not a myth were William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh, Scotland, who perpetrated at least sixteen serial murders in 1828, but that was strictly business. They were selling corpses to medical schools.

  There were many female serial killers using poison or suffocation to kill their husbands, lovers, children, siblings, parents, acquaintances or strangers of all ages for a variety of predatory, hedonistic, profit and psychopathological motives. Women were killing with poison so frequently that the British parliament in the 1850s debated introducing a law prohibiting the sale of arsenic to women.3 Of 342 charges of murder by poisoning laid in England between 1750 and 1914, 210 were against women (62 percent).4

  But there appear to be no “werewolf” or “vampire” serial killers on the record as there were all over France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US. The closest things to Jack the Ripper were several historical cases that set the stage, so to speak, in the same way that the serial necrophile “vampire” Bertrand, although not a killer, set the forensic stage for serial killers to come on the European continent.

  The “London Monster”—1790

  Literary scholar Barbara Benedict writes about a man dubbed the “Monster” terrorizing women in London:

  Although he looked “normal,” and thus did not fit into teratological categories [teratology is the study of physical abnormalities], he acted in a fashion at once human and inhuman that corresponded to traditional cultural conceptions of monstrosity. By his bloody violence, he resurrected earlier definitions of monstrosity that concentrated on perceptible elements: like the hybrids, human curiosities, giants, and demons of myth and popular “science,” he abused language, reason, physicality, and space.5

  Benedict could have been describing Jack the Ripper, but she wasn’t. This was a case that took place almost a hundred years earlier, in the post-Versailles fluffy-wig-and-saucy-big-ass-dress era—fashion holdovers from France now in the throes of revolution. For two years, from 1788 to 1790, an incipient serial “werewolf” was stalking London’s well-dressed women. He would approach them as they fumbled with their keys at their front doors, or he would suddenly rush up on them from behind, and drawing his head close to their ear and shoulder, he would mutter obscenities and viciously slash and stab them in the buttocks through their silken dresses.

  The prosecutor in the case would later comment how shocking and confounding these crimes were to the authorities in London:

  In almost every crime we can trace a motive for committing it, but in the present case, what could induce the prisoner to such barbarous and cruel depredations; no motive to induce him, no revenge to be satisfied; he abused the most beautiful part of the fair sex.6

  Indeed. The offender’s erotic buttock paraphilic partialism was mutating with an emerging sadistic-destructive class-war silk-dress fetish, the kind hinted at in both the Bichel and Dumollard cases described in chapter seven.

  More than fifty women reported being accosted and assaulted by the perpetrator. Some were hit across the back of the head by his fist; others he abused only verbally; some of those he slashed at escaped injury due to the fashion of the day, consisting of multiple thick petticoats, stays and bloomer-type underwear. But not all escaped unharmed.

  Two sisters returning from the queen’s birthday ball were at the front door of their London town house when the offender ran up on them and, pinning one between the door and front railing, mumbled obscenities and then drove a knife through her evening dress. The physician who treated her testified that the gash from her lower back to buttocks was nine inches in length and ran as deep as four inches at one point; it would have penetrated into her abdomen had her stays not deflected it.7 It took effort for the offender to drive the edged weapon home, and in some of the cases he was reported to have dropped to one knee to force the blade deeper. These were raging, angry attacks, and potentially lethal.

  London was as shocked and alarmed by these extraordinary and inexplicable attacks as they would be by Jack the Ripper a hundred years later. There was a newspaper-and-pamphlet feeding frenzy. A 100-pound reward (5,600 pounds, or 8,000 dollars, today) was offered for the capture of the Monster. The attacks escalated. Women on the street were approached by a man holding a small bouquet of artificial flowers who would ask them to smell it. Those who bent over to do so would be slashed in the face with something sharp hidden in the bouquet.

  In June 1790, one of the victims and her companions thought they recognized their assailant, and he was pursued, brought to them, identified and arrested. He turned out to be a thirty-five-year-old Welshman named Renwick (Rhynwick) Williams. Unlike the brutal, ugly monster everyone expected, Renwick was a handsome gentleman who was popular with women, just like Ted Bundy would be in his day. Several young women would testify at his trial as to his good character and gentle nature. Working as an apprentice artificial-flower maker with a French master decorative florist, he was even androgynously cute in that British, Mick Jagger, girly-
boyish way. The son of a prosperous Broad Street pharmacist from Wales, Renwick was so graceful as a youth that the great Italian dance master Giovanni Andrea Battista Gallini (Sir John Gallini) took him on as his disciple in his school. Williams was a talented violinist as well, playing second violin at concerts in Westminster Abbey and London’s Pantheon Theater.8

  But there were a few kinks in Renwick’s past. Gallini dismissed him from his dance company after accusing him of stealing his watch. Renwick found work clerking for a solicitor running for Parliament, but then he lost the job through no fault of his own. When he began to have money troubles he found employment with the artificial-flower maker, and his delicate violinist fingers were so skilled that he was quickly promoted through the apprentice ranks. But then for unknown reasons, he lost that job shortly before his arrest. There were complaints that he was unusually obsessed with the opposite sex.

  When he was apprehended, nobody knew what to charge him with. The prosecution spoke of “a crime that is so new in the annals of mankind, an act so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible.” The judge in the case complained, “The legislature never looked forward to a crime of so diabolical a nature as that of wounding his Majesty’s subjects in a most savage manner, for the mere purpose of wounding them, without any provocation to the party.”

  The press and noisy crowds outside the jail were calling for the Monster to be hanged, but due to the peculiarities of the criminal code at that time, assault, even with intent to murder, was a mere misdemeanor. Having been panicked for two years, however, the public was demanding stiff punishment for the Monster.

  The prosecution was hard-pressed to find an appropriate felony with which to charge Renwick Williams. At first they considered the Coventry Act, which made it a felony to lie in wait with the purpose of maiming or disfiguring a person. But there was no evidence that the Monster had lain in wait for his victims. The Black Act made it a felony to go about armed while in disguise, but Williams was not obviously disguised. Finally, the prosecution discovered an obscure 1721 act that was passed when English weavers, in protest against cloth being imported from India, slashed the clothes of those they saw wearing it. The act made it a felony punishable by transportation (usually to Australia) for seven years to “assault any person in the public streets, with intent to tear, spoil, cut, burn, or deface the garment or clothes of such person, provided the act be done in pursuance of such intention.”

  Williams was convicted of the charge, but his lawyers successfully appealed, and a superior court overturned the conviction, ruling that it did not apply to his case. The tearing of the clothes had occurred as a result of the assault and was not in the high court’s opinion the goal of Williams’s offense. He was tried again on three counts of the misdemeanor assault, carrying a penalty of two years for each conviction, and was sentenced to six years in prison.

  Frankly, when one reads the transcripts of the trial, there is little evidence that Renwick committed these assaults other than the word of the few good ladies who insisted they recognized him. (Not all the victims identified Renwick as their assailant.) Renwick’s fellow workers at the artificial-flower factory testified that he had been with them at work the night of the attacks, but the witnesses were of a lower class than the upper-crust victims, and worse, foreigners: French refugees from the revolution, who had to give their testimony through an interpreter. Their testimony was discounted.

  Even though no knife had ever been found in his possession, and Renwick had never been seen with one and had no record of attacks against women, he was convicted and served the six years while proclaiming his innocence all the while. After his release, Williams married, fathered a child and then vanished from history.

  Whether Williams perpetrated the crimes is not the issue here; someone did, and the attacks almost ceased entirely after Renwick Williams’s arrest. (There were several similar attacks reported while Williams was held in jail awaiting trial.) But the climate of panic, and the sales that the newspapers derived from fanning the flames of that panic, set the stage for the frenzy that Jack the Ripper would inspire. The case also framed the notion of the stalking serial monster that came from within the community.

  As Barbara Benedict concluded, “His real threat, however, seemed to lie outside the perceptible and inside the body. Whereas teratology located monstrosity corporeally, the Monster displayed an equally traditional metaphorical monstrosity that was enacted socially; his monstrosity, however, also hinted at an internal, private ontology beyond social conditioning. Despite his notoriety, he remained an invisible container of the hidden horror of mankind—indeed, specifically of men, since his crimes were considered sexual.”9

  In the decades that followed, these “invisible containers of the hidden horror of mankind” cropped up in France and Germany, unleashing similar serial sprees of paraphilic fetish assaults. They were becoming less unusual to authorities. In Paris in 1819, women on the street were attacked and cut about the thighs and buttocks by piqueurs (from the French for “to prick”).

  The term “piquerism” is still used today to indicate paraphilic stabbing or slashing committed as a substitute for sex. The attacks are most often focused on the breasts, buttocks, genitals or torso and the offender relishes the penetration, and the sight and smell of blood and abdominal viscera expelled through the wounds.

  During this period, in Augsburg, Germany, a Mädchenschneider—“girl cutter”—randomly stabbed and slashed young women in the buttocks, arms and legs. His reign of terror lasted eighteen years, claiming some fifty victims, until the arrest of a wealthy thirty-five-year-old wine merchant named Carl Bartle. In his home, authorities discovered an extensive collection of edged weapons. Bartle confessed an aversion to and disgust for women, and stated that since age nineteen he would have an orgasm at the sight of blood. He was sentenced to six years in prison.10

  In the area of Bozen and Innsbruck, several women were stabbed with a small penknife in 1828 and 1829. The perpetrator, when arrested, also confessed to a sexual compulsion to stab women, which was enhanced by the sight of dripping blood. In Leipzig, similar attacks took place in the 1860s. In Bremen in 1880, twenty-nine-year-old Theophil Mary, a hairdresser with a history of sex offenses against girls and women, was charged with slashing the breasts of thirty-five women he had encountered on the streets. Previously he had committed a series of attacks in Strasbourg, but he moved when the authorities intensified their search for the offender.

  When we put these phenomena together with the post-witch-hunt-era servant-girl serial killers and clothing fetishists like Bichel and Dumollard described in chapter seven, we begin to see a gathering storm of misogynistic “mimetic compulsions” stirring in Western society, brewing what will become Jack the Ripper.

  BRITISH MONSTERS AND MURDERS

  The next serial “monster” to trigger a public panic in England was the “Hackney Monster,” a rapist targeting schoolgirls and children in the suburb of Hackney, London. William Cooper was convicted of “various acts of indelicacy” to females, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in the house of corrections on April 27, 1805.11

  On December 7 and December 19, 1811, two serial murders occurred in London’s East End, the so-called Ratcliff [Ratcliffe] Highway Murders. In the first murder, a husband and wife, their fourteen-week-old son, an apprentice and a servant girl were battered to death late at night in their apartment behind their linen-drapery and hosiery shop. On December 19, the killer struck again, this time slaughtering the husband-and-wife owners of a pub and their servant after they had closed up the premises and gone to bed. These senseless nocturnal murders horrified Londoners. John Williams, a sailor lodging in the neighborhood, was arrested as a suspect but committed suicide in his jail cell before he could be prosecuted and tried.

  Although they were never linked together, a number of unsolved homicides of prostit
utes and women in their homes and businesses plagued London in the nineteenth century. Some of the murders had pathological features to them, although there is no compelling evidence that they were serial murders perpetrated by predecessors of Jack the Ripper.

  The most famous case that gripped the public’s imagination was the murder of Eliza Grimwood on May 26, 1838. The twenty-five-year-old prostitute, nicknamed the “Countess” because of her beauty and poise, was seen bringing a well-dressed foreign “gentleman” home from a West End theater-district stroll. The next morning, she was found on the floor of her bedroom, still dressed and her bed unslept in, the nape of her neck with a deep stab wound, her throat cut ear to ear and three stab wounds present in her chest and abdomen.12 It appeared as if somebody had attempted to sever Eliza Grimwood’s head. Her pimp was suspected in the murder, but was later cleared.

  The cry “Who killed Eliza Grimwood?” went up in the press and public and the unsolved murder figured prominently in the Victorian imagination of the dangers and risks of prostitution. The description of Eliza’s supposed gentleman murderer, nicknamed “Don Wiskerandos,” decked out for the theater in evening clothes and an opera cape, foreshadowed the popular image of Jack the Ripper as an upper-class gentleman with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde complex. Charles Dickens was inspired by the Eliza Grimwood murder case when writing the graphic murder scene in Oliver Twist, in which Bill Sikes kills the prostitute Nancy.13

  While these unsolved cases perplexed authorities, as individual homicides they were not particularly alarming, nor did they feature the kind of gross mutilation that characterized “werewolf” lust killings. They were often dismissed as crimes of passion.

  Frederick Baker—Alton, Britain, 1867