Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (15 page)

P
EOPLE WHO BELIEVE THAT WE LIVE IN A UNIQUELY VIOLENT AGE CLEARLY HAVEN’T
been paying much attention to the past 250,000 years or so of human history. Our species has been committing appalling acts of savagery—rape, mutilation, torture, cannibalism, et cetera—since the days we dwelt in caves. While it’s true that the term “serial murder” only dates back to the 1960s, the phenomenon itself—the successive slaughter of multiple victims over an extended period of time by a sadistic sexual psychopath—has existed from time immemorial, albeit under different names (lust murder, homicidal sex mania, etc.).

The same is true for the related crime we now call mass murder, in which a lone individual goes berserk and kills a bunch of people in a burst of apocalyptic violence that generally ends with his or her suicide. To be sure, the Columbine-style shootings that have become all too common in recent decades really do represent something new in the world, since they depend on modern weaponry. It’s hard, after all, to massacre thirty-two people within a short span of time (as student Seung-Hui Cho did at Virginia Tech University in April 2007) without a rapid-fire gun.

Most studies of American mass murder begin with the case of Howard Unruh, a twenty-eight-year-old World War II veteran who, armed with a 9-millimeter Luger pistol, fatally shot thirteen of his neighbors in East Camden, New Jersey, during a
twelve-minute rampage in September 1949. But though Unruh’s killing spree may have foreshadowed the Columbine era, there were plenty of mass murders before him. Since their perpetrators lacked the advantage of semiautomatic firearms, they were unable to rack up double-digit body counts. Still, they were extremely shocking for their time. A particularly notorious example occurred in New York City a full ninety years before Unruh made criminal history.

Little is known about its perpetrator, eighteen-year-old Francis A. Gouldy Jr. From reports that surfaced in the wake of his atrocity, he appears to have been troubled since early childhood. Family acquaintances described him as “utterly devoid of self-restraint,” “someone without a clear perception of moral duty,” a “very hard boy.” After flunking out of public school, he was shipped off to a boarding school in Delaware County but proved “so intractable and vicious” that he was expelled after a single term. A year at sea on board a merchant vessel failed to instill any discipline in him.

Moving back into his family home on West Thirtieth Street in Manhattan, he remained idle for months until forced to find a job. He tried his hand at clerical work but was fired from one position after another. Desperate to see his son established in life, his father—a successful lumber dealer, described as a stern but affectionate parent who “tried every way to make the boy steady”—took him on as a business partner. He also opened a sizable bank account in his son’s name. Francis would be permitted to draw on the money when he came of age, provided that he demonstrated a capacity for mature and responsible behavior.

Despite this inducement, Francis continued to act erratically. Though affectionate at times to his younger siblings, he was often “morose and revengeful, and exhibited an uncontrollable temper.” He went through a brief religious phase, joining his parents’ church on probation, but was “finally dropped on account of his irregular habits.” To his father’s dismay, he began hanging around with a crowd of neighborhood loafers, spending his spare hours in a billiard hall and frequenting a beer and oyster saloon called Showler’s. On more than one occasion, he stayed out drinking all night, staggering home late the following morning. Increasingly incensed at his son’s wayward conduct, his father confiscated his night key. Their arguments grew uglier by the day.

At around eight o’clock on Tuesday evening, October 28, 1858, Francis was seen in Showler’s, dining on oyster stew with one of his teenage cohorts. Several other
patrons overheard him say that he and his father had recently gotten into a nasty “dispute about money.” Other witnesses reported that he “drank no intoxicating liquor” with his meal and was “perfectly sober” when he left the eatery at approximately nine-thirty.

Ten minutes later, he showed up at the doorstep of his family’s handsome residence and rang the bell. Normally the door would have been answered by one of the two servant girls. This time, it was opened by Francis senior, who had been waiting for his son’s arrival. Several hours earlier, Mr. Gouldy had discovered that a bankbook had been removed from his desk. Now he demanded to know if Frank had taken it. “Yes,” Frank said coolly, declaring that “as the money was placed in the bank in his name, he had a right to take it and do as he pleased with it.” Infuriated by the boy’s insolence, his father reprimanded him sharply. Francis answered with a contemptuous laugh, then turned his back on his father and headed upstairs to his third-floor room at the rear of the house.

It was a spacious and comfortable room, “well and tastefully furnished,” according to newspaper accounts. On a table sat a pile of books, including Eugène Sue’s The
Mysteries of Paris
, the complete works of Shakespeare, and a New Testament with commentary by Dr. Adam Clarke. Displayed on the fireplace mantle were some bronze and china knickknacks, along with several daguerreotypes of Frank and a young male friend. The walls were hung with engraved pictures and a map of the Holy Land. A trunk at the foot of his bed was “filled with wearing apparel, school books, fishing tackle, ice skates, and boys’ playthings.”

Precisely what happened next is a matter of some speculation, though physical evidence made it possible to reconstruct many of the details. “It would seem,” the
New York Times
subsequently reported, “that he proceeded to his room and in a cool and collected manner, changed his dress, removing his coat, vest, and cravat, hanging his watch on a nail by the side of the mirror, taking off his boots, and even removing the sleeve-links of his shirt.” He then rummaged in one of the trunks and came up with an object he had hidden away there several months earlier: a hatchet he had brought home from Sullivan & Wyatt’s hardware store on Platt Street, where he had been briefly employed as a clerk the previous July.

Then, clutching the hatchet in one hand, he stole back downstairs in his stockinged feet and snuck into the sitting room, where his father was just turning off the gas. As his father, sensing someone behind him, turned his head, Francis brought the
blade down on his right temple. So savage was the blow that a chunk of bone, three inches long by two and a half inches wide, flew from the older man’s skull. With a fearful moan, Mr. Gouldy collapsed onto the carpeted floor, blood gushing from the wound.

Hearing a heavy fall in the adjacent room, Mrs. Jane Gouldy, who had just retired for the night, sat up in bed. Married to her husband for nine years, she was his second wife and the stepmother of his children. Contrary to the stereotype of the wicked stepmother, Jane was, by all accounts, a tender and warmhearted parent. “In her family,” wrote the
New York Times
, “she was greatly beloved, and no one among her children manifested more affection for her than did Francis.” Perhaps for this reason, there was genuine anguish in his voice when, seconds after murdering his father, he burst into Jane’s bedroom and cried out, “Mother—oh, Mother!” Then, seizing the startled woman’s hand, he delivered a vicious blow to her head with the hatchet. As she screamed and struggled to free herself from his grip, he struck her again and again until she collapsed to the floor, her face slathered with blood.

Making his way across the hallway, he entered the chamber where his two younger brothers, thirteen-year-old Nathaniel and six-year-old Charles, were sharing the same bed. He struck at them repeatedly as they slept, fracturing their skulls and chopping off chunks of bone later found amid the gore-caked bedclothes.

Next he climbed to the third floor, where the two servant girls, Johanna Murphy and Elizabeth Carr, shared a small room. Roused from their beds by the strange noises below, they had stepped out into the hallway in their nightclothes. Without speaking a word, Francis strode up to them and began hacking away at their heads. Though desperately wounded, Elizabeth—who had come to work for the Gouldy family only a few weeks earlier—grappled with her attacker and managed to wrest the weapon from his grasp.

“Give me that, Lizzie,” Francis said calmly. “I won’t kill you. I only want to get away.”

Dazed from her wound, blood pouring into her eyes, the young woman loosened her hold on the hatchet. Snatching it from her hand, Francis delivered three more savage blows to her head.

Hearing her screams, Francis’ fifteen-year-old sister, Mary, came to her door and peered into the dimly lit hallway, where a thickset figure loomed over the sprawled bodies of the two servant girls. In the darkness and confusion, she did not recognize
her brother. Assuming that a burglar had broken into the house, she slammed and locked her door, threw open a window, and began shouting for help.

By then, Francis had returned to his own room. Kneeling by his trunk, he pulled out a pistol he had stashed among the jumble, pressed the muzzle to his skull just behind his right ear, and pulled the trigger.

Moments later, three police officers from the Twentieth Ward, responding to Mary’s cries, broke open the front door. As they moved through the house, they encountered (as the
New York Times
put it) “a scene of horror such as they never before witnessed. The father lay upon the floor, his face and head covered with blood. The mother was insensible in the next room, and also deluged in blood. In the hall-bedroom, the little boys were in a similar condition. Ascending the stairs, they found the servant-girls lying in a pool of gore.”

The killer himself, his skull “greatly shattered,” lay sprawled on his back in a spreading pool of blood. Brain matter and bone fragments were scattered on the floor. His right hand clenched the pistol so tightly that one of the officers, Andrew Clow, had to yank it from his grip.

The story was front-page news the following morning. “Shocking Butchery!” blared the
New York Times
, which described the massacre as “a more horrible crime … than any we have ever before had occasion to record.” Within twenty-four hours, a printed ballad, “The Thirtieth Street Murder. A Horrible Tragedy,” was being peddled on the streets:

The crime scene became an instant attraction. Such huge crowds flocked to the Gouldys’ residence that a detachment of police officers from the Twentieth Ward was stationed outside around the clock to keep the curious from sneaking inside and making off with morbid souvenirs.

Sought out by reporters, family acquaintances offered harsh assessments of the killer. According to the Rev. Mr. Crawford of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church,
where the elder Gouldys worshipped, young Francis “was a coward. He never looked anyone straight in the face but always dropped his eyes while speaking or being spoken to. He was revengeful, obstinate, and morose. In intellectual qualities he was below mediocrity. The secretiveness of his disposition was eminently noticeable to all his friends. He was slow and heavy in his movements, and as a boy took very little part in the sports of his companions.” A phrenologist, examining a daguerreotype portrait of Francis, pronounced his head “not good,” with a “forehead that retreated like the plaster cast foreheads of idiots.”

As is the case today—when mass homicides perpetrated by juvenile misfits provoke public outcries for gun control—there were those who, in the wake of the tragedy, called for laws to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of teenage boys. According to one letter writer to the Times, Gouldy’s crime exemplified “a startling evil” that was “becoming far more common than the public is aware of,” namely, “the practice of our young men keeping in their rooms and carrying about their persons weapons of death, intending them merely as weapons of self-defense, but which in a sudden gust of passion, or to revenge a fancied wrong, or to defend themselves from a slight assault, they are tempted to use in such a way as to bring ruin upon themselves or upon others. I hope the Press will avail itself of this dreadful tragedy as to impress upon the minds of this community the enormity of this evil and be the means of producing a salutary reform.”