Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (16 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
Elizabeth Carr, the servant who had recently gone to work for the Gouldys, lingered for several days. Her last recorded words were: “Oh, that I should have gone there to be murdered by that bad boy, Frank.”
Minstrel of Mayhem
In the centuries before the advent of tabloid journalism, accounts of sensational homicides were often transmitted through “murder ballads”—crudely written poems dashed off in the immediate aftermath of some grisly killing, printed on page-long sheets known as broadsides, and sold for a few pennies. Since most of the people who composed and peddled these verses were talentless hacks—interested only in turning a quick profit by pandering to the public’s prurient interest in violent crime—they rarely signed their compositions. One exception was the author of “The Thirtieth Street Tragedy,” who proudly identified himself at the bottom of his broadside as “The Saugerties Bard.”
Thanks to folklore scholar John Thorn, we know a fair amount about this prolific balladeer, whose actual name was Henry Sherman Backus. Born in upstate New York in 1798, Backus came from a military background—his father was a major who died in battle during the War of 1812—and developed an early love of martial music, becoming an accomplished player of the fife, drum, and bugle. After teaching school for a number of years, he moved to Saugerties, married a local woman, and fathered five daughters. A series of personal tragedies, including the death of his wife and one infant daughter, apparently precipitated a breakdown that led to his confinement in a lunatic asylum and the dispersal of his remaining children to various foster homes. Upon his release, he embarked on the life of a traveling minstrel. Roaming from town to town, he would perform his self-composed ballads in taverns and roadhouses, then peddle cheaply printed copies of the lyrics to his audience. Eventually he made his way to New York City, where he continued to produce, publish, and distribute his song sheets.
Exactly how many pieces Backus composed is unknown, though scholars have attributed nearly three dozen extant broadsides to the Saugerties Bard. While he wrote on a range of subjects—prizefights, riots, Bowery gangs, steamship explosions, and other assorted disasters—he is best known for his murder ballads. Besides “The Thirtieth Street Murder,” his known works include “Dunbar, the Murderer,” “The Murdered Pedlar,” “Dr. Burdell, or the Bond Street Murder,” “The Murdered Policeman,” and “Hicks the Pirate” (see
this page
).
Even his most ardent admirers concede that Backus’ poetry rarely rose above the level of doggerel. Still, he possessed a narrative gift that distinguishes his lyrics from those of lesser balladeers. As Thorn says, “He was a master of brevity, able to tell a story that would go straight to the heart in a way that myriad columns of newspapers could not.” Still, his talent failed to translate into financial success. He died homeless and broke in Saugerties at the age of sixty-three and was buried in a pauper’s grave.
[
Source: “Shocking Butchery,”
New York Times
, October 28, 1858, 1, and “The Thirtieth-Street Tragedy,”
New York Times
, October 29, 1858, 8.
]
“THE WORST MAN WHO EVER LIVED”
L
ITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT
A
LBERT
Hicks’ family. His father, owner of a hard-scrabble farm in Gloucester, Rhode Island, “had the reputation of being an honest man.” The same could not be said for Albert’s older brother, Simon, a dull-witted lout with a nasty temper. Late one night in the mid-1850s—the exact date is difficult to ascertain—Simon snuck into the home of an acquaintance, an elderly bachelor named Crossman, and beat the sleeping old man to death with a club. He then stole several hundred dollars and absconded to Providence, where he proceeded to lavish gifts—a gold watch and “other articles of finery”—on his prostitute girlfriend. This spending spree Albert Hicks
aroused suspicion and Simon was soon under arrest. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, he was locked up in state prison but escaped during a riot and was never heard from again.
Albert Hicks
Brutish as he was, however, Simon was a solid citizen compared to his younger brother. Born in 1820, Albert ran away from home at an early age and launched into a lifelong career of crime, eventually progressing from petty crook to hired killer. A habitué of the infamous Five Points district of lower Manhattan, he allied himself with various Bowery gangs: sometimes with the Daybreak Boys, at others with the notorious Dead Rabbits. He liked to say that he was “the worst man who ever lived.” After the events of March 21, 1860, there were few who disagreed with him.
A
T ABOUT HALF
past six that Thursday morning, the crew of the schooner Telegraph, commanded by Captain H. Listare, encountered a strange apparition on the lower bay of New York harbor between Sandy Hook and Coney Island Point: a sloop, the E. A. Johnson, drifting aimlessly over the misty waters, its sails down, its bowsprit broken off, and its rigging trailing in the water. No one could be seen on deck.
Maneuvering alongside the seemingly derelict vessel, Listare boarded it and was immediately startled (in the words of one contemporary news account) “by the presence of blood in large quantities upon the deck.” Descending into the cabin, the captain discovered even more shocking signs of carnage, “the floor and all the furniture being covered or spotted with blood.” Even at a glance, it was appallingly clear “that the sloop had been the scene of some dreadful and bloody tragedy.”
Towed into port by the steam tug Ceres, the ship was tied up at the Fulton Market Slip. Shortly thereafter—the police having been notified of the discovery—the coroner and his deputies arrived. Their report, summed up in the daily press, offered a vivid picture of the butchery that had occurred on board the doomed vessel:
A coffeepot, covered with blood and human hair, was found in a corner near the stove. A broom, which had apparently been used in sweeping the blood from the floor, and a hammer, also smeared with blood, were found near the companionway. Marks of blood were found on the ladder leading up to the deck, upon the lockers, upon the sides of the cabin, and upon the ceiling. There were found fresh and distinct marks, as if made with the blade of a
knife or sharp hatchet, upon the beams and ceiling. And one of the indentations was stained with blood. The runs were, upon examination, found to be filled with blood, which had leaked down from the floor and been allowed to remain there in the clotted state in which it was discovered. All the lockers and drawers were stained with blood—probably by the assassin in search of plunder—as also the stove and cooking utensils.
THE BLOOD-STAINED CABIN OF THE OYSTER SLOOP “E. A. JOHNSON”
From the cabin, the blood was traced up the companionway to the deck, where marks as if produced by the dragging of some bloody substance were observable all along from the cabin door to the side of the vessel. The rail, too, was smeared with blood, and also the side of the sloop, showing that the assassin concluded his work by throwing the evidence of his guilt into the sea. The finger marks of blood on the rail and the indentation of a knife leads to the belief that the murderer was compelled
to sever the hand of his victim as he clung to the frail support before he could throw him overboard.
Even as the coroner’s men continued to poke through the shambles, police officers from the Second Precinct were tracking down information about the ship. They quickly discovered that, a week earlier, it had left from the Catherine Market Slip, bound for Deep Creek, Virginia, to pick up a cargo of oysters. In addition to its usual crew—Captain George H. Burr and two young sailors, Smith Watts and his brother Oliver—the sloop carried a fourth man, a hulking fellow named William Johnson who had signed on as first mate for the voyage.
The news spread quickly. Before the day was out, accounts of the apparent massacre had already appeared in the late editions. On the following morning, every daily in the city ran some variation of the same headline: “Dreadful Murder in an Oyster-Boat in New York Bay!”
When Patrick Burke, proprietor of a shabby rooming house at 129 Cedar Street, read about the tragedy in the morning papers, he hurried to the nearest police station. Boarding at his place, he explained, was a man named William Johnson, who lived there with a wife and infant son. The previous day, Johnson, who had been away at sea for about a week, returned home unexpectedly, flaunting a large wad of banknotes that he claimed to have received as a reward for “rescuing a sloop in the bay.” Johnson had spent the next few hours packing up his belongings and, after settling his bill, vacated his room, telling Burke that he was taking his family to Fall River, Massachusetts.
Before the day was over, other witnesses had come forward with stories that bolstered the landlord’s suspicions. A man matching Johnson’s description—tall, powerfully built, wearing a monkey coat and slouch hat, his jawline fringed with thick black whiskers—had been spotted the previous day rowing to shore on Staten Island in the yawl belonging to the doomed sloop. After landing a little below Fort Richmond, he had removed a large canvas bag from the boat, slung it over his shoulder, and proceeded by foot to Vanderbilt’s Landing, where he stopped at a tavern for breakfast, offering a gold ten-dollar piece in payment (the equivalent of more than $250 today), which the proprietor could not change. A few hours later, after taking the ferry to Manhattan, he appeared at the South Street office of a broker named Albert S. James, where he exchanged $130 worth of gold and silver coins for small-denomination bills issued by the Farmers’ and Citizens’ Bank of Brooklyn.
Convinced that Johnson was their man, police detectives tracked him to Fall River and from there to Providence, Rhode Island, where they found him in a rooming house, slumbering soundly beside his wife. Shaken awake, Johnson bolted upright, breaking into a profuse sweat at the sight of the officers. Though a search of his possessions turned up a silver pocket watch belonging to the slaughtered Captain Burr along with $121 in small-denomination bills from the Farmers’ and Citizens’ Bank of Brooklyn, Johnson stoutly maintained his innocence. He was taken into custody and brought to the local jailhouse, where Elias Smith, a reporter for the
New York Times
who had accompanied the detectives on their mission, confronted him.
“You are charged with imbruing your hands in the blood of three of your fellow men for money,” Smith declared.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Johnson replied, insisting “upon his soul” that he had never been on board the oyster sloop.
Agreeing to accompany the arresting officers back to New York City, he behaved “so coolly and indifferently” throughout the trip that George Nivens, the officer in charge, was “almost convinced that we had mistaken our man.” At every railway stop along the way, enormous crowds gathered to glimpse the prisoner. Some cried out for a lynching. At the New London depot, the mob was so ugly that as Nivens escorted Johnson to a different train, he found it necessary to draw his pistol and warn that “he would shoot the first man who touched” the prisoner.
No sooner were they back in the city than police learned that Johnson was really Albert W. Hicks, known to his acquaintances as “Hicksey.” A parade of witnesses were brought to his cell to identify him as the man who had shipped out aboard the E. A. Johnson. A more thorough search of his belongings turned up deeply incriminating evidence, including a daguerreotype of Oliver Watts’ seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Catherine Dickenson.
Hicks, however, continued to profess his innocence and did so throughout his sensational five-day trial, which opened on May 14, 1860. Despite the butchery he had perpetrated, he was tried not for murder but for piracy, defined by Congress as “robbery committed upon the high seas, or in any basin or bay within the admiralty maritime jurisdiction of the United States.” Given the wealth of stolen property found in his possession—and the fact that no corpses had ever been found—this was an easier charge to prove against Hicks and, very important, one that carried a far more severe penalty than robbery committed upon land. As the prosecuting attorney James F. Dwight explained to the jurors in his opening statement, robbery committed upon
the high seas was “punishable with death,” a sentence “designed to protect more effectually and punish more thoroughly offenses committed upon vessels upon the high seas, where the protection for person and property is not so great as it can be on land, where individuals are so much surrounded by the police regulations to protect them and their property.”