Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (11 page)
Read Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of Online
Authors: Harold Schechter
Edward Matthews”
According to the signature on this printed broadside ballad, its author was V. P. Coolidge himself. However—as folklore scholar Olive Wooley Burt observes in her book, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories—“whether he actually composed the verses or this was a wily trick of one who wished to profit by the event is impossible to say.”
Poor Edward Matthews, where is he?
Sent headlong to eternity,
The mortal debt by him is paid,
And in his narrow bed he’s laid.
No more will anguish seize his soul;
No more will poison fill his bowl;
No more will fiendship clutch his throat,
Or o’er his mangled body gloat.
O, V. P. Coolidge, how could you
So black a deed of murder do?
You on your honor did pretend
To be his nearest earthly friend.
You knew to Brighton he had gone,
And watched each hour for his return,
The hay for cattle which he drove
You swore within your heart to have.
You failed in that but did succeed,
By promising a mortgage deed,
Of all on earth that you possessed
So that he could safely rest.
The money from the bank he drew
And brought with faithfulness to you,
Not dreaming of your vile intent,
Alone into your office went.
You said, “Dear Matthews, worthy friend.
Our friendship here shall never end.
A glass of brandy you must drink;
’Twill do you good, I surely think.”
He drank the liquor you had fixed,
With Prussic acid amply mixed.
Then cried, “O Lord! What can it be?
What poison have you given me?”
You seized his throat and stopp’d his breath,
Until your friend lay still in death.
Then with your hatchet bruised his head
After he was entirely dead.
His money then you took away,
And his watch out in your sleigh;
Then called to your confederate
And all your doings did relate.
I have a secret, Flint, you said,
And if by you I am betrayed
The state will me for murder try
And on the gallows I must die.
That cursed Matthews, don’t you think?
Came here and did some brandy drink,
Then instantly he fell down dead,
And I have thumped him on the head.
Where can we now his body thrust,
So that no one can us mistrust,
In yonder room his corpse is laid,
I wish the river were its bed.
The murder we have done this night,
Tomorrow will be brought to light,
But my character and name
Will shield me from all harm and blame.
We dragged his lifeless form away,
Into a cellar there to lay,
Until someone by chance did see
His mangled, bruised and dead body.
O, Edward Matthews, could you know
The scathing pangs I undergo,
You surely would look down from Heaven,
And say, “Let Coolidge be forgiven.”
[
Sources: The Trial of Valorous P. Coolidge: For the Murder of Edward Matthews, at Waterville, Maine (Boston: Boston Daily Times, 1848); Jay Robert Nash, Murder, America (Simon & Schuster, 1982).
]
“THE VEILED MURDERESS”
O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING
, M
AY
15, 1905, papers from coast to coast ran articles about the death, by natural causes, of an elderly woman whose age was variously reported as seventy-eight and eighty-nine. The story was newsworthy for several reasons. For one thing, the woman in question had spent the last fifty-two years in confinement for a double murder she committed in 1853. For another, though she went by the assumed name of Henrietta Robinson, no one in all that time ever learned her real identity.
There were, in lieu of facts, various fanciful rumors about her origins. According to one, she was the illegitimate child of an Irish lord named Pagnum. Born and raised in the ancestral castle, she was seduced at an early age by a scoundrel named Robinson, son of her father’s steward, who carried her off to New York City, then deserted her, “taking with him every penny she had in the world.” Moving upstate to Troy, she became the mistress “of a certain well known gentleman of that city,” who also cast her off after a few years, plunging her into a life of “reckless dissipation.”
Another version claimed that she was born in Quebec, the daughter of one of the city’s oldest and most eminent families. Sent to an exclusive female seminary in Troy at the age of sixteen, she fell passionately in love with a young man who, though of “estimable character,” came from a much less exalted social class. Fearing that their
daughter might marry beneath her station, her parents removed her from the school, brought her back to Canada, and married her off to a British aristocrat, who took her to England. Though their marriage produced two children, it was a cold and loveless union. After a few years, her aversion to her husband had grown so extreme that she ran away and returned to her family home in Quebec.
Henrietta Robinson
Far from receiving a sympathetic welcome, however, she was spurned by her outraged father, who denounced her for bringing disgrace upon the family and “drove her from the house with an admonition never to return.” Eventually she made her way back to Troy, where, for a while, she lived as the kept woman of a prominent local politician. When that relationship ended, her behavior grew increasingly erratic. “Addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors” (as one early biographer puts it), she began to show signs of what a later age would diagnose as paranoia. Rambling aimlessly through the streets, she would
stop casual passers-by to tell them that her neighbors were a band of burglars who were plotting to pillage her house. She continually imagined that she was surrounded by a mob. She armed herself with pistols and openly threatened “to wash her hands in the blood of her enemies.” On one occasion, she entered the house of a neighboring woman, inquired for her son, and very deliberately remarked that she desired to
shoot him. She was found groping in the dark, through the halls of public buildings, inquiring for the police office and demanding of the authorities assistance to protect her house.
Though the truth about her background would never be established, no doubts exist about the events that earned her nationwide notoriety in the spring of 1853. At the time, Mrs. Robinson, as she called herself, was renting a small cottage in a largely Irish neighborhood at the north end of Troy. Directly across the street stood a low wooden building occupied by Timothy Lanagan, a thirty-seven-year-old Irish immigrant, his wife, and their four small children. The building was divided in two, one half serving as the family dwelling, the other as a small grocery and liquor store and a popular hangout for his countrymen. Occasionally Lanagan supplemented his income by holding dances there on a Saturday night.
From the time Lanagan opened his business in October 1852, Mrs. Robinson had been one of his regulars, coming in nearly every day to purchase her household provisions, along with a steady supply of beer and brandy. She paid her bills promptly and was on good enough terms with the Lanagans to borrow small sums of money from them when she ran low on funds. Despite her eccentricities, the Lanagans regarded her as a friend.
Then came the trouble at the dance.
It happened in early March 1853. Mrs. Robinson was attending one of the Saturday night socials held by Lanagan when a young man approached her and asked her to dance. Precisely how he phrased the request is unknown, but Mrs. Robinson became violently incensed. Drawing the pistol she kept concealed in her bosom, she aimed it at the young man and threatened to “blow his brains out.” Seeing the disturbance, Lanagan hurried over, told her that he would not tolerate “such a noise, and that she must leave.” When she resisted, he took her firmly by the arm and escorted her across the street to her own door.
Two mornings later, Mrs. Robinson showed up at the Lanagans’ front door and began to berate the proprietor’s wife, telling her that she was a “mean woman” who invited “rowdies to her house to insult me.” She threatened to get the family evicted and have their grocer’s license revoked. Roused from his bed by the uproar, Lanagan ordered Mrs. Robinson to leave at once.
“Do you mean to throw out so good a customer?” cried Mrs. Robinson.
Lanagan replied that he “did not want her custom” anymore and repeated his demand.
Mrs. Robinson refused. If he wanted her to leave, “he would have to get a constable to do it.”
Eventually Lanagan managed to get her out of there. For several weeks, the grocer and his wife saw nothing of Mrs. Robinson. Gradually, however, she resumed her visits to the store, and by the middle of May their relationship had returned to its former cordial status. Or so it seemed.
S
HORTLY AFTER DAYBREAK
on Wednesday, May 25, Mrs. Robinson appeared at the Lanagans’ store, where she purchased a quart of beer and a pound of soda crackers. She returned a few hours later to ask for a loan of $2. When Mrs. Lanagan replied that she did not have the money on hand, Mrs. Robinson left in a huff.
She was back before noon, in a state of extreme agitation. She had just received a dreadful telegram, she exclaimed. Her husband, “a very prominent citizen” who was traveling out west, had been killed in a railway accident. This was a wild tale that Mrs. Robinson’s neighbors had heard before. Several of Lanagan’s chums were hanging around the store, and one of them joked that he didn’t see what Mrs. Robinson was so upset about. “I have a wife out West,” he said, “and if she was dead, I wouldn’t fret about it.” The remark brought a burst of laughter from the others. Turning on the men, Mrs. Robinson began to rant at them. The scene became so ugly that she was finally shown the door.
She wasn’t gone long. Less than two hours later, Timothy Lanagan, his wife, and a visiting relation, twenty-five-year-old Catherine Lubee, were finishing their midday meal at the kitchen table when she reappeared. Inviting herself to join them, Mrs. Robinson pointed to an uneaten hard-boiled egg and asked, “Whose is that?”
“Yours if you want it,” said Lanagan, then rose from his chair and disappeared into his store.
Mrs. Robinson seated herself at the table, while her good-natured hostess peeled a potato and set it before her. As she did, she noticed a piece of white paper, folded into a small packet, clutched in one of Mrs. Robinson’s hands. Later she would realize what the little packet contained. At the time, however, Mrs. Lanagan thought nothing of it.
After polishing off her simple repast, Mrs. Robinson asked for a glass of beer and invited the other two women to join her. Both declined.
As Mrs. Lanagan rose to fetch beer for her idiosyncratic guest, Mrs. Robinson asked if she had any sugar. Mrs. Lanagan was surprised. Why did Mrs. Robinson need sugar? She had already bought several pounds during the past week.
No, no, Mrs. Robinson replied. She didn’t want to buy any. She only wanted a little to mix in her beer to cut the bitterness.
Stepping into the store, Mrs. Lanagan returned a few moments later with a quart measure of beer and a saucer heaped with powdered sugar. Having decided to join her neighbor in a drink after all, she poured the beer into two tumblers. As she did, Mrs. Robinson rose and stepped away from the table, her back toward Mrs. Lanagan. In one hand she held the saucer full of sugar; in the other, the folded packet of paper.
When she stepped back to the table a moment later, Mrs. Robinson complained that the glasses were not full. Indulgent as ever of her neighbor’s whims, Mrs. Lanagan went back into the store for more beer. When she returned, Mrs. Robinson was stirring sugar into the tumblers.
After filling the glasses to the brim, Mrs. Lanagan reseated herself and took hold of her tumbler. As she lifted it to her lips, however, she noticed a powdery film on the surface. Thinking, as she later testified, that “it was some dust from the sugar,” she picked up a spoon to skim it off. Immediately, Mrs. Robinson, who was observing her closely, snatched the spoon from her hand and exclaimed, “Don’t do that! That’s the best part.”
At that very moment, Timothy Lanagan called to his wife. Placing the untouched glass back on the table, she crossed into the grocery, where her husband asked her to mind the store while he ran an errand downtown. On his way out, he passed through the kitchen, spotted the untasted beer, and paused to drink it. No sooner had he drained the glass and departed than Mrs. Robinson—who had not so much as sipped her own beer—rose and hurried from the house without a word.