Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (21 page)

Perhaps the best-known of these “medical museums” was the New York Museum of Anatomy at 618 Broadway. Advertising flyers for this establishment claimed that it contained twenty thousand “novel and astounding” objects, including the preserved head of a Hungarian with “a perfect deer head growing out of his forehead,” a “child with one body, two arms, two heads, and four legs,” George Washington’s deathbed, a genuine hermaphrodite, and—trumpeted in bold letters on the handbill—“
THE HEAD AND RIGHT ARM OF ANTON PROBST
, Murderer of the Deering Family, Amputated After Execution!”

For all the tongue-clucking of today’s moral crusaders, who are forever decrying the supposedly debased state of American culture, it’s clear from this advertisement that things were much worse in the past, when displaying the severed body parts of an executed criminal was a socially acceptable form of commercial entertainment. The flyer also highlights another fact: that Anton Probst, totally forgotten today, was one of the most notorious murderers of his time, perpetrator of a deed so heinous that to the public it seemed the work of an incarnate fiend—“The Monster in the Shape of a Man.”

Anton Probst murder pamphlet

B
ORN IN
B
ADEN
, Germany, in 1842, Probst—a “sullen, brutish” youth who, as he put it, “was never brought up to any trade”—sailed for the United States in May 1863. No sooner had he disembarked in New York City than a Union Army recruiter, spotting the burly young immigrant guzzling beer in a saloon, persuaded him to enlist by promising an immediate cash bounty. Six weeks later, Probst deserted. Then, looking to collect another bounty, he promptly enlisted in a different regiment. He repeated this scam—“bounty jumping,” as it was known—a few more times until he was discharged in the spring of 1865 after accidentally shooting off his right thumb while on picket duty in Richmond.

Heading for Philadelphia, he quickly blew all his money in barrooms and brothels, then knocked
around the region for a few months, working odd manual jobs until he fell ill and ended up in the almshouse. He was back on his feet by the fall. It was while roaming around the countryside of South Philadelphia, searching for work, that he happened upon the farmstead of Christopher Deering.

An immigrant himself, the thirty-eight-year-old Deering had come to America in 1849 to escape the potato famine ravaging his native Ireland. In 1855, he married Julia Duffy, an Irishwoman seven years his senior who bore him five children in rapid succession. Settled in a rural, sparsely populated area of South Philadelphia known locally as “The Neck,” he raised and sold cattle in partnership with a fellow named Theodore Mitchell, who supplied the capital for the enterprise and split the profits with Deering.

Needing a hand, Deering took on Probst for a salary of $15 a month, plus board. Though built for farm labor, the brawny, bull-necked Probst was never one to overexert himself. He quit after three weeks because, as he later explained, his employer asked him to work in the fields “on a rainy, very rough day.” Deering’s wife, Julia, wasn’t sorry to see him go. According to subsequent accounts, there was something in Probst’s “conduct and manner” that made her uneasy.

Following his usual pattern, Probst quickly blew through his earnings on liquor and prostitutes. Broke again, he spent a few days doing menial chores at his favorite saloon, then passed another stretch in the almshouse before showing up at Christopher Deering’s place again on February 2, 1866.

“I have no work and no money,” Probst explained in his heavily accented English. It was a measure of Deering’s kindly nature that he agreed to rehire the young German. He could not know, of course, that Probst—who, during his previous stay, had seen his employer counting cash on several occasions—had returned (as he put it) “to get hold of his money.”

E
ARLY
S
ATURDAY MORNING
, April 7, Christopher Deering boarded his buggy and drove into the city, leaving behind his wife, four of his children, and his two employees—Probst and a seventeen-year-old farmhand named Cornelius Carey. Deering was going to pick up his cousin, Elizabeth Dolan, a forty-nine-year-old spinster from Burlington, New Jersey. A frequent visitor to the Deering farm, Miss Dolan had taken the seven o’clock steamboat for Philadelphia. She was wearing “furs and a black
coat,” sporting a gold chain, and carrying a black carpetbag that, in addition to her personal effects, contained a pocketbook with $100 in cash.

On his way to fetch his guest, Deering stopped to perform several errands. At around 8:30 a.m., he made his weekly visit to the stand of a street peddler named Jane Greenwell to purchase six pounds of meat for his family. He then headed to the home of his partner, Thomas Mitchell, to transact some business. Short of cash, he borrowed $10 from Mitchell. Then—after consulting his pocket watch and seeing that he was running late—he hurried off to the steamboat landing.

By the time he arrived, the boat had already docked and discharged its passengers. Driving back down Second Street, he spotted his cousin and pulled up to the curb beside her. A passerby, one Mrs. Wilson, saw Miss Dolan climb into the buggy beside Deering, who then drove off toward Front Street in the direction of his farm. Mrs. Wilson thus became a key figure in the story: the last eyewitness to see Christopher Deering and his cousin alive.

L
IKE OTHER INHABITANTS
of The Neck, the Deerings lived in relative isolation. One of their nearest neighbors was Abraham Everett, whose farm lay nearly a quarter mile away. Everett, who liked to keep up with the news, subscribed to several Philadelphia gazettes. Every Saturday afternoon, the Deerings’ eight-year-old son, John, hiked the distance to Everett’s home and borrowed the previous week’s papers.

On Saturday, April 7, however, the boy never showed up. Nor did he appear on succeeding days. By Wednesday, Everett was concerned enough to stop off at the Deering place while on his way into town. No one was in sight when he rode up to the house. Dismounting from his horse, he knocked at the front door, but no one responded.

Proceeding to the barn, he was shocked to find Deering’s horses “in a state of starvation and nearly dead from thirst.” Immediately he grabbed a bucket, hurried out to a water-filled ditch, and began attending to the horses. “I gave one five buckets of water, another four buckets,” he later testified. “I then put water in the trough and another drank the whole lot of it. Another I turned out into the yard and he drank, I suppose, for a full fifteen minutes out of the ditch.” Everett then released the adult horses into the meadow to feed and brought a bunch of hay to the starving colt tied up in the stable.

Once he had taken care of the animals, he returned to the house, climbed onto the front porch, and peered through a window. He was startled to see that, as he put it, “things looked as if they had been knocked around considerably inside. The house looked as if someone had ransacked it.” Shoving open the window, he climbed inside and headed upstairs, where he found the rooms in the same state of wild disorder, “the beds all torn upside down,” clothes scattered about, bureau drawers rifled.

Dashing downstairs again, he made for the house of the nearest neighbor, Robert Wyles. Spotting Wyles’ farmhand John Gould at work in a meadow, Everett called to the young man and hurried him back to the Deering place. Inside the barn, Gould spotted something that Everett, in his focus on the suffering horses, had missed. Jutting out from a pile of hay was an object that Gould at first took for a stocking. When he stooped to pick it up, however, he discovered “to his amazement and horror” that there was a foot inside it.

Gould immediately alerted his employer, Robert Wyles, who made for the nearest police station. Within a short time several officers arrived on the scene, led by the city’s chief of detectives, a longtime veteran of the department who bore the revered name Benjamin Franklin. Pulling the hay off the protruding limb, Franklin and his colleagues made a horrifying discovery.

“There lay a man who was recognized as Mr. Deering,” the newspapers reported. “He was extended on the floor cross-wise with the length of the barn. He was dressed in a suit of dark gray clothes, the same in which he had been seen and known on the last day of his life. His head was crushed into pieces, almost to powdered bone, and his throat was cut, nay chopped, from ear to ear. Beside him was a young woman, unknown to these neighbors, whose appearance showed she had met her fate in the same way. Her head and throat revealed the same wounds as were seen on the man by whose side she was lying.”

Another, even more ghastly discovery awaited. Not far from the spot where the two savaged corpses lay was a small corn crib, about five feet wide and eight feet long, half filled with hay. Removing the hay, Franklin and his men uncovered a sight so appalling that they were rendered dumbstruck. There lay the decomposed body of Julia Deering, her skull beaten in, her throat gashed open to the neck bone. Heaped “around her and upon her were her four little ones, slaughtered in the identical manner. The little babe in death, lay upon its mother’s breast as it had done in life so often—a sight to make strong men weep.”

Apart from the Deerings’ oldest child, ten-year-old Willie—spared only because he was visiting his grandparents in Schuylkill—the entire family had been slaughtered. No one could recall a crime of similar magnitude. It was, in the view of one observer, an atrocity without “parallel in the catalogue of mere private murders in the annals of the world.”

News of the massacre, trumpeted in the next day’s headlines, set off the predictable frenzied response. Within twenty-four hours, the Deering farm was overrun with thousands of morbid curiosity seekers. One local journalist, reporting on the scene, was amazed “to see the vast numbers of persons on foot or running as if it were a race of life and death. There were old men who would not have to travel far to find the graves, and young men who were making a holiday excursion of the fearful pilgrimage. A minister of the gospel on horseback passed us, trotting rapidly along. A cripple on crutches swung his distorted legs over the dusty road, making no slow progress. But the women outnumbered the men of all ages, and in all attires from the fashionably dressed lady in her barouche to the poor seamstress on foot.” Though a contingent of police officers prevented the mob from entering the house, a crowd of ghoulish souvenir hunters managed to shove their way into the barn and make off with clumps of bloody straw.

It was one of these individuals who spotted something strange on the property: a man’s shirt and a pair of drawers lying beside a large haystack about three hundred yards from the barn. He informed a police officer named Dawson Mitchell, who went to investigate. Making a circuit of the haystack, Dawson noticed a spot that had been hollowed out of the straw. He thrust in his hand and immediately felt a human body. Grabbing it by the arm, he pulled it free. It was the decomposed corpse of the Deerings’ seventeen-year-old farmhand, Cornelius Carey. He had been killed like the others, his head “broken into fragments” and his throat hacked open from ear to ear.

By then, the police had found the implements that had obviously been used as the murder weapons: a bloody hammer tossed in the hay just inside the entrance to the barn; a small hatchet, likewise encrusted with blood, lying in a ditch not far from the house; and a full-sized axe with blood upon the blade, found in a woodshed.

They had also identified the Deerings’ other employee as their prime suspect. None of the neighbors knew much about him, but they could offer a fairly thorough description: “about thirty, bull-necked, missing his right thumb. His English was poor and his first name was believed to be ‘Anthony.’ ”

I
T MIGHT BE
supposed that a man who had methodically slaughtered eight people, including three prepubescent children and a fourteen-month-old infant, would lose no time in putting as much distance between himself and the crime scene as possible. For all his low cunning, however, Anton Probst was incapable of prudent calculation. Indeed, from all available evidence, he thought of nothing beyond the gratification of his immediate physical needs.