Authors: Harold Schechter
Other suspects who proved to have airtight alibis included a man named George Boska, who was picked up after telling a friend that police were on his trail; one Theodore Anderson of San Francisco, arrested after threatening the life of a female acquaintance in her hotel room at 168 Eddy Street; and Mrs. Russell’s former husband, Charles, a mail-truck driver in Riverside.
Meanwhile, police were applying the latest advances in crime-detection technology in an effort to track down the strangler. Under the supervision of Sergeant Carl Newman, head of the Santa Barbara branch of the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, a bloody thumbprint found on the door casing of the murder room was photographed by Deputy Sheriff Carl J. Wallace using a sophisticated fingerprint camera borrowed from the Ventura P.D. Afterward, the section of wood imprinted with the bloody mark was removed from the doorframe, carefully packaged, and sent to bureau headquarters in Sacramento for analysis by experts.
Unfortunately, they were unable to come up with a match. The strangler case was rapidly turning into an embarrassment for the bureau whose achievements had been so highly touted in the national press.
†
San Francisco Chronicle
Brown’s story is somewhat incoherent.
T
he week of August 8, 1926, wasn’t a time for particularly weighty news. Leafing through their morning papers, readers would have learned about Bishop Adna W. Leonard’s anti-Catholic assault on Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York and aspiring presidential candidate. “No Governor can kiss the Papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House!” thundered Leonard, superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church and president of the AntiSaloon League. Bishop Leonard, whose attack formed a part of his Sunday morning sermon, devoted the bulk of his speech to a nationwide call for Anglo-Saxon unity against foreigners, particularly Latins.
In the view of many people, who regarded the bishop’s remarks as distinctly un-Christian, two other men of the cloth fulfilled the precepts of their faith in a far more exemplary way. After leaping into the waters off Sidi-Biahr beach near Alexandria, Egypt, to rescue a trio of drowning girls, two American missionaries-the Reverends J. W. Baird and R. G. McGill of the United Presbyterian Church—ran back into the waves to help a struggling countrywoman, Mrs. A. A. Thompson of Pittsburgh. Before they could reach her, Mrs. Thompson had managed to swim out of danger and was floating placidly towards shore when the young missionaries themselves were caught in an undertow and drowned.
Two other swimmers were luckier that week, narrowly escaping death during an attempt to cross the English Channel. Ten hours after setting out from Cape Gris-Nez, France, on Monday, August 9, Ishak Helmy and George Michel noticed that the crew of their accompanying tug, the
Alsace
, was frantically signalling to them. It took a moment for the swimmers to understand what all the commotion was about. An enormous school of sharks—at least twenty in all—was rapidly approaching the swimmers. Helmy and Michel were hauled to safety just as the sharks closed in. “I am not afraid of them,” Helmy said to reporters afterward. “But I do not like them.”
Sharks weren’t the only man-eating creatures in the news that week. According to a report from the Chief Game Warden of the British Colony of Uganda, a unique race of maneating lions had created a virtual “reign of terror” in the Sanga district of Ankole. “An appalling death toll has resulted in the region,” wrote the warden. “One lion alone was responsible for eighty-four deaths and another for more than forty kills before they were destroyed.” Unlike the average lion—which has an instinctive fear of people and kills them only under extreme circumstances—the Sanga breed appeared to have an innate preference for human flesh, presumably inherited from man-eating forebears who had been “driven by accident or hunger in a period of starvation” to prey on the local populace.
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 seemed 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.