Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (13 page)

After a stint as a cabin boy on a Great Lakes schooner inauspiciously named Dread, he found himself stranded in Erie, Pennsylvania, “without home and friends.” Making his way back to Ohio, he apprenticed with a blacksmith for six or seven months until he was stricken with “a severe case of rheumatism,” which left him “a cripple for life by the permanent distortion of his feet.” He was thirteen years old.

After a knockabout adolescence, he found a new vocation as a tailor. He had his first run-in with the law at the age of twenty-six while plying his trade at a shop in Milan, Ohio. When a fellow journeyman named Adams complained that the shop was too stuffy and threw open the windows over Ward’s objections, the latter, flying into a rage, sprang from his workbench and, with a heavy wooden board, “aimed a furious blow” at Adams, breaking his shoulder. Adams swore out a warrant against his assailant but was persuaded to drop the charges for a $5 payoff.

Not long afterward, Ward committed another assault, hurling a rock at a young man named Myers who had provoked him with an unspecified “practical joke.” The rock, writes Ward’s first chronicler, “struck Myers in the face and knocked him senseless, so that for a time it was feared he was dead.” This time, Ward was arrested, “convicted of assault and battery, and sentenced to a diet of bread and water during several days in the county jail.”

Despite an unprepossessing appearance and a personality to match—he is typically described as bald, squat, and bull-necked with a foul mouth, violent temper, and “sinister countenance”—Ward seems to have had no difficulty attracting the opposite sex. Around the time of his trouble with Adams, he won the heart of a young woman and, after promising marriage, promptly seduced her—“obtained such ascendancy over her that she yielded her person to his wishes,” in the quaint words of his chronicler. Having “gratified his illicit passions,” he then broke the engagement and discarded the poor, ruined maid.

Soon after “this base and dishonorable abandonment,” he “bestowed his attentions” on a woman named Sarah Lamson, daughter of a prosperous farmer. Despite the objections of her father—who conveyed his displeasure by effectively writing her out of his will—Sarah eloped with Ward.

Domestic life did nothing to soften his brutal character. Quite the contrary. Not long after the nuptials, he set fire to the house of a business rival and found himself on trial for arson. Though ultimately acquitted, he remained under such a thick cloud of suspicion that he found it necessary to relocate to a different part of the state, where he took up a new vocation: tavern keeper. His nineteenth-century biographer, reflecting the intense anti-saloon sentiments of the age, argues that this new business was guaranteed “to smother what little of humanity remained” in Ward. Be that as it may, there is no question that, during this period, his crimes, formerly limited to assault and arson, escalated to murder.

I
N
1847,
WARD
became proprietor of a little tavern called the Eagle House, situated at the northeast corner of Wooster and Norwalk streets in Planktown, Ohio. One of his regulars was a merchant named Noah Hall, owner of the town general store. Owing to what one local historian describes as “some difference with his wife,” the fifty-year-old Hall spent as little time as possible at home, sleeping on a cot in the rear of his store and taking most of his meals at Ward’s tavern.

In those days, before there were such things as traveling salesmen, shopkeepers such as Hall had to make periodic trips to large urban centers to stock up on merchandise. One day in March 1850, while taking his dinner at Ward’s tavern, Hall let it be known that he “was about to start for New York to purchase goods” with “a considerable sum of money.” He planned to leave, he said, the day after next.

The following evening, while Hall was over at the Eagle House eating dinner, Ward snuck into his store and unfastened the back door. He then waited until midnight and, armed with a heavy iron poker, let himself in. As expected, he found Hall sleeping soundly in the rear. Then, as he describes in his confession, he proceeded to murder his friend with cool deliberation:

Ransacking the store, he found Hall’s stash of nearly $800 (around $22,000 in today’s money). Before leaving, he arranged the crime scene “so as to create the impression that the business had been done by regular burglars.” Ultimately Ward not only managed to direct suspicion onto two local ne’er-do-wells, Daniel Myers and Thomas McGarvy, but also served as the main prosecution witness at their trial.

S
INCE THE HISTORICAL
record tells us virtually nothing about Ward’s wife, Sarah, it is impossible to know exactly why she suffered a severe psychological breakdown in the months following Noah Hall’s murder. It is conceivable that she was not a very stable person to begin with. Certainly life with the psychopathic Ward—who, despite the sizable sum he had realized from the crime, seemed to grow more and more “irritable, restless and wretched” by the day—could not have benefited her mental health.

Ward himself eventually put forth his own theory: that, while he had succeeded in duping the rest of the town, Sarah “from the first suspected that her husband was the real murderer,” and that her “insanity was caused by constantly dwelling on his guilt and by the dread of exposure.”

Whatever the case, records clearly indicate that within a year of the crime, Sarah Ward had become “entirely deranged” and was committed to the State Lunatic Asylum at Columbus.

W
HILE THE SLAYING
of Noah Hall was impelled at least partly by greed, Ward’s second murder seemed motivated simply by his newfound taste for blood. Certainly, he had no mercenary reasons for committing the crime. As his biographer observes, “his circumstances were now easy.” The cash he had stolen from Hall had left him “in no pressing want of money,” while his wife’s incarceration in the insane asylum meant “he had no family to care for.” In attempting to account for this seemingly gratuitous atrocity, Ward’s contemporaries could only conclude that he was a “monster” who “evinced a coolness, a hardness and an insensibility which are very rare in the history of the greatest criminals.” A later age would have a different name for such a being: serial killer.

The victim was a peddler named Lovejoy, who showed up at the Eagle House one evening about a year after Hall’s murder, looking for supper and a bed for the night. After passing a congenial couple of hours conversing with Ward in the barroom, “he complained of being very tired and feeling very much in the need of sleep,” according to Ward’s later confession. Ward showed him to his room “on the second floor in the corner of the house,” then retired to his own chamber. “At that time,” said Ward, “I had no idea of killing him.”

A few hours later, however, he “awoke about midnight, and the thought struck me that the peddler might have money.” Knowing that “there was no lock on the door,” he “got up, went to his room, opened the door softly and found him asleep. The moon was shining in at the window, making the room almost as light as day. I knew that he was very tired and that a slight noise would not disturb him. Everything was so favorable that the temptation to kill him seemed irresistible.”

Descending to the barroom, Ward “got an old axe and returned upstairs to the peddler’s room. I found him still sound asleep and lying in a favorable position; so I took hold of the axe with both hands and dealt him a tremendous blow on the top of his head. I struck him only once. He scarcely struggled and in a few moments was dead. He made no noise whatever.”

How to dispose of the peddler’s corpse was a question that, as Ward put it, he “had not sufficiently considered beforehand.” A solution quickly suggested itself. Fetching a “dry goods box” from downstairs, he dismembered the corpse with his axe—“unjointed the legs at the thighs and knees,” as he recounts in his confession. Then, after “wrapping the various parts in sheets and blankets so as to prevent the blood from oozing out,” he packed the butchered remains “all safely in the box, put on the cover, and took the box to my bedroom.”

The following morning, he “placed the box with its gruesome contents in his wagon and, under the pretext of going to his father’s at Milan, traveled through the whole day” until, at around ten o’clock that night, he reached “the neighborhood of the Huron River. About a mile and a half above Abbott’s Bridge,” he “tumbled the box, heavily weighted with various irons, into the river,” where it sank to the bottom and was never found. From this “startling and revolting crime” (as one observer characterized it) Ward realized the sum of $50.

N
OT LONG AFTERWARD
, Ward moved again, this time to the town of Shelby, where he took up his former occupation as a tailor. He hadn’t been there long when he met, wooed, and—without bothering to obtain a divorce—bigamously wed a woman named Susan Reese.

In 1854, the couple relocated to Sylvania in northwestern Ohio, renting a small wooden one-story building that served as both dwelling and tailor shop. Shortly after their arrival, Susan gave birth to a girl who died at the age of two months. The child was buried on the Reese family farm.

In January 1856, Susan followed her infant to the grave. At the time, there was no suspicion of foul play; the official cause of her death was given as “bilious typhoid fever.” In light of later events, however, that diagnosis would be called into serious question.

W
ARD, WHO HAD
long since squandered his ill-gotten gains from his two murder-robberies, was now living alone in his little house in Sylvania’s “downtown” area—a single street lined with simple wooden dwellings like his own, along with the usual businesses: grocery, livery stable, blacksmith, saloon, and the like. He did not remain single for long, however. Within eight months of Susan’s death, he had made the acquaintance of a widow named Olive Davis, a Michigan native with two young children of her own. Three days after they met, in the fall of 1856, they got married.

Their union was a nightmare from the start. Ward not only treated his new wife with unrelenting cruelty but was so vicious to her children that, for their own well-being, she shipped them off to live with relatives. Left by themselves in the cramped, sixteen-by-twenty-foot house, the couple were constantly at each other’s throats. Before long, Olive was confiding to friends that she feared for her life. Ward, she said, had brandished a dagger and “told her if she did not look out, it would be the death of her.”

In early January 1857—just a few months after their wedding—Olive fled Sylvania and went to stay with some friends in her hometown of Adrian, Michigan. Ward did not take kindly to the desertion. Following her to Adrian, he demanded that she come back to him. Olive refused, informing him that “she did not like him well enough to live with him.”

Returning to Sylvania, Ward dispatched an emissary, an acquaintance named William Warren, instructing him to tell Olive that “if she would only come back and live with him,” he would mend his ways—“do differently by her and let her have more liberty and not always accuse her of improper conduct.” Warren came home with happy news: Olive had consented to return if Ward sent her $10 for train fare. The money was forthcoming, and at around midnight on Saturday, January 31, Olive arrived back at Sylvania. The next morning, however, Olive began packing up all her clothing. When Ward confronted her, she told him “plainly that she intended to leave him for good.” She had only come back to collect her possessions. Her declaration, Ward later confessed, “aroused all the vile passions of my
nature. From the moment she uttered it, I was fully resolved that she should never leave my house alive.”