Bestial (2 page)

Clearly, in the realm of sexual homicide, as in all other areas of human experience, there is no new thing under the sun.

Still, it is only in recent years that the problem has become so severe that certain writers on the subject bandy words like plague and epidemic. While this language
smacks of hyperbole (not to say hysteria), it remains true that these crimes have increased at an unsettling rate. As much as any movie star or media celeb, the serial killer—the psychopathic monster masquerading behind a façade of bland normality—has become one of the denning symbols of our day.

A chart put together by criminologist Ron Hohnes, which lists every American serial killer of the twentieth century, confirms the point. The list contains only 18 names for the first four decades of the century. By contrast, in the years since 1970 alone, there are over 120—and that doesn’t count the ones who haven’t been caught.

Indeed, the term “serial killer” wasn’t even coined until the mid-1970s (by FBI criminologist Robert K. Ressler. Before then, serial murder was so rare that it wasn’t perceived as a separate category of crime. Before then, in fact, it was so rare that, when one of these lust-killers went on a spree, the police often couldn’t tell what they were dealing with.

That was certainly the case in the 1920s. In the latter years of that decade, the country was shocked by a string of killings that seemed almost inconceivably brutal. This is not to say that Americans of that era were unfamiliar with vicious crimes. On the contrary, it was a time so rife with violence that one historian has dubbed it “The Lawless Decade.” But the murders that made the headlines tended to involve tommy guns, bootleggers, and victims with nicknames like Bloody Angelo, Little Mike, and Tony the Gentleman.

The killings that commenced in February 1926 were of a frighteningly different order from the gangland carnage of the day. The victims were ordinary women, most of them middle-aged but some significantly younger, who were savagely slain in their homes. Often, their strangled and outraged corpses were discovered in bizarre hiding places—shoved into steamer trunks, thrust under beds, crammed behind basement furnaces.

The American public had never known anything like it. Other murders may have received more publicity (like the sensational 1922 double slaying of the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and his choir-singer mistress, Mrs. Eleanor
Mills, whose corpses were found, amid a scattering of love letters, in a New Jersey orchard). But none provoked greater horror. There seemed to be a monster on the loose. Nowadays, we know what to call such creatures—but back then, the phrase “serial killer” was still fifty years in the future. To die terrified citizens of the time, the unknown maniac—roaming from city to city, selecting his victims at random—seemed like something from a horror story, say, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Indeed, in certain grisly regards, the killer’s m.o. bore a chilling resemblance to the horrors in one of Poe’s most famous tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The victims in that story are a pair of Parisian women, a widowed mother and her grown daughter, who are hideously murdered in their apartment. The mysterious assailant, a being of prodigious strength, disposes of the daughter’s body by stuffing it feet first up the chimney.

Thanks to the deductive brilliance of Poe’s hero, C. Auguste Dupin (the fictional forerunner of Sherlock Holmes), the culprit is ultimately identified. He—or, rather,
it
—turns out to be an ape: more specifically, a “large, tawny Ourang-Outang” that has escaped from its owner, a French seaman who has brought the creature back from Borneo as a pet.

The true-life horrors that started in the winter of ′26 seemed like the frightening realization of these imaginary crimes—women murdered in their homes by a creature of appalling strength and savagery; corpses wedged into tiny spaces in a grotesque effort at concealment. It was as if the homicidal simian dreamed up by Poe had come terrifyingly to life.

Perhaps it was for this reason that an unknown reporter, writing about the killer in a West Coast tabloid, tagged nun with an epithet that would send tremors of apprehension from one end of the American continent to the other: the “Gorilla Man.”

Eventually the “Gorilla Man” would be captured. But not before he had completed an odyssey that carried him across the country and up into Canada. Along the way, he left a trail of corpses: twenty-two victims, all but one of them female, ranging in age from eight months to sixty-six years.

*    *    *

They say that truth is stranger than fiction but, in this case, that cliché doesn’t stand up. After all, what could be more bizarre than Poe’s story of a double murder committed by an Ourang-Outang?

On the other hand, the murderous monkey of Poe’s famous fantasy dispatched a total of two victims. By contrast, the true-life “Gorilla Man” did away with nearly two
dozen
—setting a ghastly record that would not be broken until the advent of beings like Ted Bundy, Ottis Toole, and Henry Lee Lucas. It would seem that even an imagination as morbid as Poe’s couldn’t conceive of the horrors that would become commonplace in our own century.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the appalling life of the “Gorilla Man,” it may simply be this: Truth is not necessarily stranger than fiction. But sometimes it can be a good deal more gruesome—and much,
much
scarier.

†

†

Matthew Worth Pinkerton,
Murder in All Ages
(1898)

It was not claimed that Durrant was insane, yet that there was something morally defective in his make-up is apparent. Cases like his do not, most happily, often occur, but their occurrence is frequent enough to show that “man is joined to the beasts of the field by his body,” and may become something worse than a beast of prey, when he flings aside conscience, love of humanity and God, and resolves, no matter at the expense of what crimes, to gratify his bestial tendencies.

T
o all outward appearances, Theodore Durrant (“Theo” to his friends) was a fine, upstanding specimen of young American manhood. A bright and personable twenty-three-year-old who still lived at home with his parents, he spent his weekdays pursuing his M.D. at San Francisco’s Cooper Medical College. When he wasn’t engaged hi his studies, he could generally be found at the Emanuel Baptist Church on Bartlett Street, where he served as assistant superintendent of the Sunday School, church librarian, and secretary of the Young People’s Society. His sense of civic duty seemed as strong as his Christian devotion. In addition to his other activities, he was a member of the California militia signal corps.

He was good-looking to boot: tall, trim, and athletic, with
an erect carriage and fine, almost feminine, features—high cheekbones, full mouth, big, blue eyes. True, some of his acquaintances found the cast of those eyes slightly disconcerting. In certain lights, they seemed pale to the point of glassiness, “fishlike” (in the words of one contemporary).

Still, Theodore Durrant cut a handsome, even dashing, figure. Women tended to find him deeply attractive. To a striking degree, he had a good deal in common with another clean-favored psychopath, born fifty years later, with whom he shared a name: Theodore Bundy.

To be sure, even before Durrant’s monstrous nature was revealed to the world, a few of his intimates had caught glimpses of his dark side. To one companion, he bragged of his visits to the brothels of Carson City. To another, he described the time when he and three acquaintances, a trio of hard-drinking railroad workers, had assaulted an Indian woman.

Still, his friends weren’t especially troubled by these confessions. Even a paragon like Theo needed to sow his wild oats. And the rape victim, after all, had only been a squaw.

Among the respectable young women who were irresistibly drawn to Theo Durrant was an eighteen-year-old named Blanche Lament. A student at the Powell Street Normal School, where she was training for a career as a teacher, Lamont—a striking blonde with an eye-catching figure—was a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived from Montana in 1894. She had moved into the home of her elderly aunt, a widow named Noble. Sometime shortly after settling into her new life, Blanche Lamont met and became enamored of the charming young medical student, Theo Durrant.

On the afternoon of April 3, 1895, following a full day in the classroom, Blanche emerged from the Powell Street school to find Durrant waiting for her on the sidewalk. Witnesses saw the couple board a trolley, then disembark in the neighborhood of the Emanuel Baptist Church. An elderly woman who lived directly across from the red, wooden church observed the handsome young pair enter the building at precisely 4:00
P.M
.

It was the last time Blanche Lamont was seen alive.

When her niece failed to return home that evening, Mrs.
Noble contacted the police. The next day, having learned of Blanche’s friendship with Durrant, several officers showed up at his home to question him. Durrant’s response to the girl’s disappearance was slightly peculiar—he seemed notably indifferent, casually suggesting that she might have been shanghaied by a gang of white slavers.

Still, the officers had no reason to suspect the estimable young man. The newspapers ran a few stories on the case, while the police fruitlessly pursued their investigation. Theo Durrant made a personal visit to Mrs. Noble to offer his own singular brand of reassurance. There was no doubt in his mind, he declared, that Blanche was still alive, though probably imprisoned in a house of prostitution. He would do everything in his power, he vowed, to rescue the poor girl from bondage.

In the meantime, Durrant turned his attentions to another lady friend. She was a petite, twenty-one-year-old brunette named Minnie Williams, who had come to know and love Theo through their shared involvement in the church.

On Good Friday, April 12,1895—nine days after Blanche Lamont’s disappearance—Minnie Williams left her boardinghouse at around 7:00
P.M
., informing the landlady that she was going off to attend a meeting of the Young People’s Society at the home of its supervisor, Dr. Vogel. She never made it to the gathering. Not far from the Emanuel Baptist Church, she met Theo Durrant. Escorting her to the darkened building, he unlocked the front door with his personal key and led her to the seclusion of the library.

Later that evening, at around 9:30
P.M
., Theo showed up by himself at Dr. Vogel’s house. The young man’s normally pallid complexion was even whiter than usual, his hair was dishevelled, his brow beaded with sweat. Explaining that he had been stricken with a sudden bout of dyspepsia, Durrant hurried to the bathroom. When he emerged a while later, he appeared completely recovered.

The rest of the evening passed so pleasantly that Theo was sorry to see it end. Still, it had been a tiring day and he needed some sleep—particularly since he was scheduled to leave town early the next morning on an outing with the signal corps. They were heading for Mount Diablo, fifty miles from the city.

Durrant and his fellow volunteers had already reached their destination when several middle-aged ladies arrived at the Emanuel Baptist Church the following day, April 13, 1895, to decorate it for Easter. After completing their task, they repaired to the church library and immediately spotted a reddish-brown trail that led to a closed-off storage room. One of the women pulled open the door, let out a shriek, and faulted. Others ran into the street, crying for the police.

The sight that had sent them screaming from the church was Minnie Williams’ mutilated corpse, sprawled on the floor of the storage room.

The young woman had been subjected to a monstrous assault. The condition of her body was vividly described in a contemporary account.

Her clothing was torn and disheveled. She had been gagged, and that in a manner indicative of a fiend rather than a man. A portion of her underclothing had been thrust down her throat with a stick, her tongue being terribly lacerated by the operation. A cut across her wrist had severed both arteries and tendons. She had been stabbed in each breast, and directly over her heart was a deep cut in which a portion of a broken knife remained. This was an ordinary silver table-knife, one of those used in the church at entertainments where refreshments were served. It was round at the end, and so dull that great force must have been used to inflict the fearful wounds; indeed, it appeared that the cold-blooded wretch had deliberately unfastened his victim’s dress that the knife might penetrate her flesh. The little room was covered with blood.

Later, after examining the young woman’s remains, the coroner concluded that Minnie Williams had been raped after death.

This time suspicion fell immediately on Theo Durrant. That suspicion was confirmed when, searching Durrant’s bedroom, investigators discovered Minnie Williams’ purse stuffed inside the pocket of the suit jacket he had worn to Dr. Vogel’s gathering the evening before.

By Sunday morning, the
San Francisco Chronicle
was
openly naming Durrant as the killer, not only of Minnie Williams but of Blanche Lament as well—even though there was no definitive proof that the latter had been murdered.

But that situation was about to change.

That same morning—Easter Sunday, April 14, 1895—a party of police officers arrived at Emanuel Baptist Church to conduct a search. They had little hope of success. After all, the Lamont girl had been missing for eleven days, and it seemed highly unlikely that a decomposing corpse could have been stashed on the premises without attracting any notice, particularly during the busy week preceding Easter. Still, they wanted to cover every possibility.

After making a thorough, fruitless search of the main part of the building, they ascended to the steeple. Overlooking Bartlett Street, the steeple had a strictly ornamental function, since it housed no bell. In fact, it was completely boarded up from inside. Few members of the church had ever entered it.