Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (22 page)

On the evening of Saturday, April 7, just hours after he had perpetrated his mass butchery, he showed up at a brothel on Front Street, carrying a black carpetbag containing, among other items, two watches, a gold chain, a snuffbox, a pistol, and a powder flask. After a night of “dissipation and debauchery” with a prostitute named Lavinia Whitman, he left early Sunday morning, paying her $3 in greenbacks.

He next took a room at a tavern on Newmarket Street, a favorite hangout of his, run by a man named William Leckfeldt. For the next five days, he was in and out of the tavern, drinking beer and shooting dice when he wasn’t making brief excursions around the city to pawn his stolen goods for pocket money.

At around 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 12, five days after the massacre, he was seated in the barroom of Leckfeldt’s when two police officers appeared to ask the proprietor if he had seen “a suspicious-looking man.” Drawing his slouch hat over his eyes and sinking into his seat, Probst made himself as inconspicuous as possible until the policemen departed. The moment they were gone, he leapt from his seat and, without bothering to fetch his possessions, hurried out into the night.

Not long afterward, an officer named James Dorsey spotted a burly fellow with his hat pulled low on his head making for the Market Street Bridge. There was something furtive about the man’s bearing that aroused Dorsey’s suspicions. Looking closer, he saw that the man was missing his right thumb.

Overtaking Probst before he reached the bridge, Dorsey plucked off his hat for a better look at his face. “Good evening,” he said.

“How de do,” replied Probst.

Hearing the accent, Dorsey asked: “You’re a Dutchman?”

Probst’s reply would become the stuff of local legend. “No,” he said. “Me a Frenchman.”

“You are, are you?” said Dorsey, grabbing Probst by the arm. “Take a walk with me.” Down at the Sixth District station house, a search of Probst’s pockets turned up Christopher Deering’s pistol and snuffbox. In fact, as the police quickly determined, Probst was wearing Deering’s clothes, having exchanged them for his own blood-soaked shirt and pants before fleeing the crime scene. The black carpetbag, retrieved from Leckfeldt’s tavern, was identified as the one Elizabeth Dolan had been carrying on her ill-fated visit. Every item it contained, including two straight razors, several spools of thread, and a few “five-penny children’s trinkets,” had been taken from the Deering home.

Interrogated by Mayor Morton McMichael, Probst, after making the predictable protestations of innocence, admitted that he had slain Cornelius Carey but insisted that the other seven victims had been slain by an accomplice, a Swiss cutthroat named Gauntner who had served with him in the Union Army. With an enraged mob laying siege to the jailhouse, howling for his blood, he was transferred to the safety of Moyamensing Prison to await trial.

PROBST ON TRIAL

T
HE PROCEEDINGS BEGAN
on Wednesday, April 25, just two weeks after the murders were uncovered. Faced with an impossible task, Probst’s court-appointed attorneys, John P. O’Neill and John A. Wolbert, admitted that their client was guilty of larceny but argued that the evidence of murder, being strictly circumstantial, was
not strong enough to establish his guilt. Even they clearly knew that their efforts were hopeless. The jury took just over twenty minutes to convict.

In delivering his sentence, Judge Joseph Allison vented the indignation shared by the entire community. “You have been found guilty of the commission of one of the most appalling crimes of which the records of civilized jurisprudence make any mention,” he told Probst. “Almost without motive eight innocent victims you slew; not suddenly, not in a tempest of resistless passion, but in the coolness of a premeditated design—one by one, at intervals, with solemn pause, with calm deliberation, and with a quenchless thirst for blood, you ceased not until all that you set out to do was fully accomplished, and when you found yourself alone with the dead, you felt your triumph was complete. And with what horrid mockery of life you grouped these dead together—mother and children close gathered to each other: cheek pressed to cheek as if in calm repose; and like one who lays him down as sentinel to keep his silent watch, husband and father, in company with his friend and relative, you placed, as if to guard his wife and little ones from harm. How all these ghastly countenances and rigid forms and glaring, sightless eyes condemned you, as on them you looked and claimed the work as all your own! Justice now claims you as its own. And that which it requires to be done shall not be long delayed.”

With that, Judge Allison ordered Probst to “be taken to the place of execution” and “there hung by the neck until dead,” the sentence to be carried out in five weeks, on June 8, 1866.

W
HILE AWAITING DEATH
, Probst continued to insist that he was innocent of all but one of the eight murders, that of Cornelius Carey. However, after much importuning by his spiritual advisor, the Reverend Gunther of St. Alphonsus’ Church, he agreed to make a clean breast of things. On the morning of May 7, he dictated two separate confessions, one to Chief of Detectives Benjamin Franklin, the other to his attorneys, Messrs. Wolbert and O’Neill. Though differing slightly in language, the documents agree in every detail and are equally chilling in the matter-of-fact way Probst recounts his utter annihilation of the Deering household.

According to Probst, his original intention was only to rob Christopher Deering by sneaking into his house and taking all the money he could find. He never had a chance, however, because there were always people around. Finally, “on the Saturday
morning of the murder, about 9 o’clock,” he “formed the design of killing the entire family.” “I could not,” he explained, “get the money in any other way.”

That morning, he and Cornelius Carey were out in the field by the haystack, loading wood on a cart to take to the barn. There was a big axe in the cart, used for cutting tree roots. “We were standing under the big tree when I killed him,” said Probst. “It was raining a little. He sat down under the tree and talked about work, while I stood right behind him with the axe in my hand. I hit him on the left side of the head. He did not holler. He fell down. I gave him one or two more blows and then cut his throat. I put him on the cart. Then I pulled it up to the haystack and lifted him up and laid him in the haystack and covered him up with hay.”

N
OW THAT HE
had decided to confess, Probst held nothing back. Casually fingering a rosary as he reclined on his cot, he was, in the words of one person present, “quiet, undemonstrative, cool and unembarrassed,” sharing his “bloody reminiscences without the least trace of shame or remorse.”

“Then I came down to the stable,” he continued. “I took the big axe, the little axe, and the hammer and put them all at the corner of the door, so they would be handy for me. Then I went over to the house. The children were all in the house and the woman was out at the ditch for water.

“I took the oldest boy, John, and told him to go over to the stable and help me with something. I went inside the door, got the little axe in my hand, and then he comes in. I knocked him down and he fell inside. I gave him one or two more of the same and cut and chopped his throat. I carried him to the crib and hauled him inside and put a little hay on him. Then I put the axe at the same place by the door.

“Then I went out and told the woman to come over, there was something the matter with the little horse, the colt. She comes in two or three minutes alone. I stood inside and struck her on the head. She did not holler. I gave her two or three more blows and chopped her throat. I took her on my shoulder and hauled her into the crib. Then I put the axe in the same place as before by the door.

“Then I go over to the house for the other boy, Thomas is his name, the next oldest. I told him his mother wanted him. He said nothing at all and walks right into the stable. I walked behind him. I hit him on the head and he laid down. He didn’t holler. I hit him once more. I don’t know whether I mashed his whole skull in. I didn’t examine him. I brought him in the crib with the others and covered him with hay.

Probst despatching Mrs. Deering.

“Then I went over to the house and took Annie. I told her her mother wanted to see her in the stable. She did not say a word. Then I took the baby on my arm. The little girl walked alongside of me. I left the baby by the corner as you go into the stable playing in the hay. Then I picked up the little axe and went over to Annie as she looked around for her mother. I knocked her down with one blow and cut her throat same as the others. Then I went back and got the little baby and gave it one on the forehead. Then I took the sharp side of the axe and chopped its throat. Then I hauled them into the crib and covered them up with hay. I guess it took me a half an hour to kill the family.

“Then I went in the house and stayed there, watching for Mr. Deering to come home.

“I guess about half-past one o’clock, I looked through the window and saw him coming with Miss Dolan in the carriage. I went out of the house and stayed outside. When he come, I stepped up to the carriage and told him the steer is sick over in the stable, he had better see him. He walked right over with me to the stable while Miss Dolan went into the house.

“He went into the stable. I walked behind him and picked up the small axe and struck him one on the head. He fell right down on his face. He never said a word. I
turned him over and gave him one or two more on his head and chopped his throat. Then I put a little hay over him and left him laying there. Going out, I put my axe in the same place.

Barbarous murder of the infant.

“Then Miss Dolan called me over to the house. She asked me where the woman and children are. I told her they are all in the stable. I said Mr. Deering wanted to see her over there. She walks right in the stable. I took the hammer with my left hand and hit her on the head and she fell right down on her face. I turned her round, hit her once more in the head, then took the little axe and chopped her throat.

“Then I went to Mr. Deering and took the watch and pocket-book from him and put them in my pocket. After that, I took Mr. Deering’s boots off and laid him in the place where he was found and put Miss Dolan there and covered them up with hay.”

His butchery completed, Probst returned to the house, ransacked the place, then washed up, shaved, and changed his bloody garments for a set of Deering’s clothes. Famished from his exertions, he fixed himself some bread and butter and relaxed until sunset, when he snuck out and made for town.

“I feel much better now that I have told the truth about this thing,” Probst said with a smile at the end of his appalling recitation. “I feel relieved.”

Asked by Chief Franklin why on earth he had perpetrated such an atrocity, Probst gave a little shrug. “I only wanted the money,” he said. “I killed the boy Cornelius first so that he could not tell on me. I killed the two oldest children so they would not afterwards identify me. I killed the two youngest as I did not wish to leave them in the house alone without someone to care for them. I had no ill feeling to anyone in the family. They always treated me well.”