Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd (5 page)

During the period while the indictments had been hanging over him, Meyer had, upon advice of counsel, eschewed all extramarital relationships. Now he began to make up for lost time. Between his amatory pursuits and the time consumed in trying to find a way of doing away with his wife without getting caught, Dr. Meyer had little time for his practice. The result was that it began to fall off. Women still took money. Meyer was not only broke; he was deeply in debt.

Then one day—two years after his marriage to Ida Geldermann—a big plumber named Peter Bretz came into his office. Meyer saw at once that Bretz, none too bright, was an ideal hypnotic subject.

Dr. Meyer took Bretz home to dinner that night. He had given his wife a big build-up to Bretz. The plumber was immediately smitten by the woman. As weeks wore on, Meyer saw to it that Bretz and his wife were almost constantly in each other’s company. He got Bretz more and more in his power until the man was a mere puppet. Playing both ends against the middle, the hypnotic plotter began to work on his wife, too. He had been unable to hypnotize her out of her money, but by suggestion he had her believing she was in love with Bretz. This was all like something that you would expect to read in a badly overdrawn piece of horror fiction. Yet it was one day all to be put down in cold black-and-white courtroom testimony, with the victims admitting that that had willingly accepted the hypnotic attempts of the doctor.

When Meyer had his two pawns just where he wanted them, he planted the seed of murder in Bretz’s mind. Bretz, with money Meyer had obtained through performing an operation, was to run off to Colorado with Mrs. Meyer. When he got her there, he was to show her the Grand Canyon. Then, when nobody was looking, Bretz was to shove Mrs. Meyer over the canyon edge. The two subjects left for Colorado. Meyer would be safe from all suspicion this time. People would say that his wife had gotten just what she deserved for running off with one of her husband’s patients.

Day by day, Dr. Meyer looked in the newspapers for some word of the accident in Colorado. He was still looking, in vain, when two men from the State’s Attorney’s Office dropped in on him. Peter Bretz, it developed, had come out of the hypnotic spell when he was on the edge of the Grand Canyon, all set to push Mrs. Meyer to her death. He had returned to Chicago with the woman and they had gone to the authorities and told the incredible story.

Although Dr. Meyer was quickly indicted for attempted murder, the lawyer O’Brien got him released long enough to perform a series of operations, and thus to realize enough cash to finance his legal battle.

O’Brien knew how to handle certain cases, and he liked this one. Bretz’s story, although quite true, had a basically improbable ring to it since the public knew virtually nothing about hypnotism around the century’s turn. Yet the State’s Attorney had no choice but to put Bretz on the witness stand; that was the only way he could establish the case against the little cinnamon-haired fiend.

Putting Bretz on the stand was like putting the fat in the fire. By the time O’Brien was through cross-examining Bretz, the jury somehow had the feeling that Bretz had hypnotized Dr. Meyer instead of the other way about. So the physician, throwing an Inverness over his trim little frame, walked into a Chicago winter twilight a free man.

Ida Geldermann-Meyer had by this time concluded that her marriage to the doctor was unlikely to turn out successfully. So she divorced him. Despite his second acquittal, the little plotter was in ill repute throughout Chicago.

One bright spot in the otherwise dark picture was a ravishing young red-haired admirer named Mary Dressen. She had attended the physician’s latest trial, become enamored of him and written him mash letters.

Mary Dressen was the first woman Meyer had ever met who made him lose his desire for other women. Even Meyer himself could hardly believe that his sex life was at last stabilized. Mary, a thin little thing—but not too thin—was a demanding creature. Meyer didn’t want to take any chances on losing her. So he married her. He forged the name of another doctor to a check and went to the Grand Canyon, of all places, on his honeymoon with Mary. When he returned, the police were waiting for him. He had been indicted for forgery.

O’Brien wore a reluctant air as he listened to Meyer’s plea that he take the case. Just as O’Brien had suspected, Meyer not only had no cash, but had no prospects of getting any. The solicitor shook his head gravely from side to side. Forgery, he said, was a most serious offense, and he feared there was nothing for Dr. Meyer to do but go to jail. So he went.

In jail, where he was to do a year, Meyer met two men who fitted into his future plans. Both were serving terms for drunkenness. One was a tall, lanky man of thirty-five, named Carl Mueller, who was called the Professor because he was a beer-hall pianist and had long hair. The second was a sawed-off brewery-wagon driver of indeterminate age named Gustav Baum. Meyer’s plans for the future were simple. They were based on his need for a large amount of cash with which to take a world tour with his third wife, who visited him regularly in jail. The idea was an insurance fraud.

Professor Mueller, Gustav Baum and Meyer and his wife were to go to New York and establish fictitious backgrounds for themselves. Mrs. Meyer was to resume her maiden name and go through a marriage ceremony with Baum, a marriage that was never to be actually consummated. Baum, posing as a rich real-estate operator, was to take out $100,000 worth of insurance in various companies, naming his wife as beneficiary. Professor Mueller, set up in a fancy-looking music studio, was to pose as a long-standing friend of the insured man. So was Dr. Meyer, who was going to resume practice in Manhattan, where nobody knew anything about him. Meyer and Mueller would satisfy the insurance companies of the validity of Baum’s claim that he was a big-timer to whom $100,000 in insurance would be a natural thing. After a respectable amount of time had elapsed, Dr. Meyer, as Baum’s physician, was to notify the insurance companies that his friend and patient had died of complications. Meyer, through his professional connections, was to get a cadaver and palm it off on the insurance company’s adjusters as Baum. Then, when the $100,000 was paid to the beneficiary, everybody would split and leave town. It was an ingenious plot, and all of the actors in it liked their parts. Baum, Mueller and Meyer were all released about the same time. Meyer passed some more bad checks to finance the trip to New York. Then everybody left town.

Baum and his wife-in-name-only were rented a beautifully furnished apartment on East 13th Street, near Fifth Avenue, for the benefit of insurance salesmen and examining doctors. It was during this very first phase of the goings-on that the plot got out of hand. Baum, an uncouth man, tried to consummate the marriage. Mary rebuffed him, then reported him to Meyer. The doctor, outrageously jealous, made a mental note of Baum’s reprehensible behavior.

Almost a year later, Meyer told Professor Mueller that the plot was reaching its climax. He said, he had, notified the insurance companies that Baum was dead. He requested that the Professor come to the flat on 13th Street and identify a cadaver from a medical college as that of Baum.

Mueller looked at the body.

“That ain’t a body from a medical college,” he said, startled. “It’s Baum hisself.”

There was nothing, Meyer pointed out, that Professor Mueller could do about it. Next, Meyer called in Mary.

“I poisoned him,” he told her. “I thought you would be glad because of how he treated you.”

A fortune was in the offing. Meyer sent out for a case of champagne. He and Mary and the Professor were a little unsteady on their feet when an adjuster from one of the insurance companies walked in on them. A champagne party, in the opinion of the adjuster, was hardly a way for the widow and two closest friends of the deceased to exhibit their grief.

The adjuster made no attempt to hide his bleak view of the situation. This had a sobering effect on the celebrants. As soon as the adjuster left, they all packed and left.

Meyer hung around 13th Street and watched the house where the body was. It began to draw detectives like a honey pot drawing flies. Meyer saw the body being removed. He knew toxicologists would find it loaded with arsenic. It would now be utterly useless, not to say highly dangerous, for Mary to attempt to collect anything on Baum.

Meyer, Mary and the Professor fled to Toledo. There, Mary, in the delayed realization that she was married to an inhuman little monster, left Meyer.

Meyer read in the papers that he was being hunted for the New York insurance murder. He dyed his hair black, substituted rimless eyeglasses for his silver-rimmed ones, and had lifts put in his shoes to increase his height. He topped off his disguise by assuming a new name—Dr. Hugo Weiler. He began to practice in Toledo, Ohio, without a license, just enough to make a living. He held onto Professor Mueller and got him a job playing the piano in a beer hall.

Meyer needed the Professor; he was cooking up still another insurance plot. An outrageously egotistical little man, he wouldn’t admit defeat. He would perpetrate a successful insurance plot if it were his last act on earth. He had come to have nothing but contempt for the law-enforcement authorities, and who could blame him? He had gotten away with murder—the murders of Henry Geldermann and his first wife—and with an attempted murder. It had been only through injudicious case of champagne and deplorable timing that the insurance companies had become aware of the fact that all was not regular with the demise of Gustav Baum. The Professor was growing increasingly confused mentally because of the fear that the law would catch up with him and send him to the electric chair in Sing Sing. After all, he had been implicated, however innocently, in a murder.

The professor’s plight was all grist for Meyer’s mill. He played on the man’s fear and brought his hypnotic powers into play on him. Soon the Professor was as much of a pawn as Peter Bretz, the Grand Canyon traveler, had been. With the Professor in his power, Meyer scoured the city for a lonely, plain girl who would fit into the plot he was brewing. He found one: Mary Neiss, a demure young lady of twenty who sold neckties in a Toledo department store. He contrived that the Professor would meet Mary Neiss.

Getting the girl under a spell, Meyer now had little trouble maneuvering the Professor and Mary into marriage. The Professor and his wife went to live in a little cottage on the outskirts of the city. Meyer instructed the groom to take out $25,000 worth of insurance on the bride. Meyer’s influence over Mueller, who knew so much about him, must have been tremendous for Mueller not to have suspected what was in the wind. But Mueller took out the insurance and Meyer paid for it. Doctor Meyer became a regular visitor at the cottage of the newlyweds. He cooked meals for his host and hostess, preparing what he described as especially nourishing dishes for the Professor’s wife. The victim took to her bed. Meyer arrived one day but found the door of the cottage locked. The Professor called on him at his office that evening.

“You can’t give Mary any more of that stuff!” he said to Meyer.

“And why not?” demanded Meyer.

“Because I’ve fallen in love with her,” Meyer began to giggle. Then he became hysterical at the irony of it all.

The Professor took Mary to Chicago with him. He had relatives there. He told them everything. Once more the State’s Attorney in Cook County listened to an incredible tale involving an incredible criminal.

The hunt for Meyer became nationwide. The doctor fled to Detroit. There he met a woman: the first woman who could make him forget the former Mary Dressen.

Like his third wife, this woman was demanding and expensive. Motivated even now by a woman, rather than caution in the face of great danger, Meyer did the one thing he was capable of doing to make a lot of money in a hurry. He began to practice as a crippled children’s specialist.

The hands of one of the most heartless killers of modem times were, miraculously enough, still great healing agents. As in Chicago, he attracted attention in Detroit almost overnight as a miracle man with children. He became lost in his work, not because he cared the least bit about the children he treated, but because of the large sums of money he was making. And at night, when the last cripple had been treated, there was always his latest woman.

But inevitably Meyer’s work with children in Detroit reached the wide-open ears of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and one day the Pinks and the Detroit police took him without a struggle.

The Professor went free by testifying against Meyer at Doc’s trial for killing Baum. Lucky, Meyer got life instead of death.

The little man must have had visitors in his cell in Sing Sing —Henry Geldermann, his first wife, Ida Geldermann and Gustav Baum, even if no one else could see them. He mentioned their names constantly. Then one day he died: stark, raving mad, presumably after thinking too much about all that he had done.

The whole shameful business started off innocently enough. On a bitterly cold day in January, in the year of 1909, a petite, nicely-distributed brunette, who was forty-five years old but who, despite the fact that she had four grown sons, looked to be about twenty-eight, went into a doctor’s office in the village of Ubly, in Huron County, Michigan, to get something taken out of her eye. The physician, Doctor Robert MacGregor, should have simply looked into the lady’s eye, taken out whatever was in there, charged his fee, and seen the last of her.

What did happen, though, was something else again; the doctor saw considerably more of the lady than he should have seen. That set off a chain reaction that was to practically populate a local cemetery with murder victims.

The lady was Carrie Sparling, the wife of John Wesley Sparling, a prosperous milk farmer of neighboring Sanilac County, an hour’s buggy drive from the village of Ubly. She appeared in Doctor MacGregor’s waiting room about noon that day, after having driven in from the farm herself. When the door of the physician’s consulting room opened there stood the good doctor, a tall handsome athletic buck of a man.