Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (31 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
A
T FIRST SUSPICION
fell on a twenty-four-year-old stonemason named William Drew, who—though married with children—was reputed to have made “improper advances” toward a number of schoolgirls, including Josie Langmaid. Ultimately, however, various witnesses supported Drew’s claim that he had been mending a wall on a neighbor’s farm at the time of the murder.
A few days later, Pembroke officials received a letter from Coroner Farnsworth of St. Albans, Vermont, who had read about the Langmaid case in the papers and noted its striking similarity to the rape and murder of Marietta Ball a year and a half earlier. Police immediately paid a visit to the home of Ball’s accused killer, where a search of Lapage’s bedroom turned up a bloody overcoat, a bloodstained hat, and a pair of trousers “bespattered with blood from the belt line all the way down to the cuffs.” A comparison of his boots to a tracing of the heel print left on Josie’s face revealed a precise match.
Despite Lapage’s insistence that he had been “lost in the woods” at the time of the murder, a high school girl named Hattie Gault swore that she had seen him striding down Academy Road with an axe in his hand at eight-thirty that morning. Another witness, Thomas Gardiner, told police that on the afternoon of October 4—after Josie was reported missing but before her body had been found—he and his wife received a visit from Lapage. When Mrs. Gardiner remarked on Josie’s disappearance, Lapage blurted, “It’s too bad that the girl has been killed.” Then—seemingly aware of his blunder—he turned and “hurried away as quick as he could.”
Taken into custody, Lapage was indicted for the murder, rape, and mutilation of Josie Langmaid. During his incarceration, a newspaper reporter sought out Lapage’s long-suffering wife and questioned her about the earlier murder of Marietta Ball. She claimed that she had “no evidence that would link him” to the crime, “but since she had foiled an attempt by him to ravish their own fifteen-year-old daughter, she had to admit that he was capable of committing it.”
In the meantime, Lapage was busily trying to dig his way to freedom with a makeshift tool fashioned from a piece of his metal bed frame. He managed to pry loose seventeen bricks from the wall of his cell before his jailers became aware of his efforts.
An “immense throng” showed up at the Concord City Hall for the start of his trial on the morning of Tuesday, January 4, 1876. Before the actual proceedings began, the
jurors, along with the defendant, were taken by carriage to the scene of the murder. As Lapage looked on indifferently, the dozen men were led into the woods and shown “the precise locality where the headless body” had been found. A large stake, marking the spot, had been driven into the earth, and the surrounding trees and shrubs were festooned with pieces of black crape—tokens of mourning from Josie’s friends and neighbors. From that somber place the jurors were led to the spot where her head had been discovered. On a nearby tree, someone had whittled away a section of bark and, on the exposed wood, inscribed the following with a lead pencil: “J. Langmaid’s Head found here, October 5, 1875. Poor Josie, may her soul rest in peace.”
Lapage condemned. (
Courtesy of New York State Historical Association Library, Cooperstown.
)
The proceedings themselves lasted six days and produced one particularly dramatic moment: the appearance of Lapage’s French-speaking sister-in-law Julienne Rousse, who—testifying through a translator—vividly described the terrifying morning five years earlier when Lapage had (as she put it) “outraged her person.” In the end, the jury took just ninety minutes to convict him. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the appeals court ruled that Judge Foster had erred in admitting Rousse’s testimony since it had no direct bearing on the Langmaid murder. The reversal, however, proved
only a temporary setback for the state. A second trial in March 1877 culminated in another swift conviction.
A year would pass before his execution on March 15, 1878. Confined in the state prison in Concord, New Hampshire, Lapage—according to the
New York Times
—was a “perfectly docile” prisoner, “giving no trouble to the Warden or any of his keepers. He made no complaints about his treatment, nor asked for anything.” On the Monday before his scheduled hanging, he had a final meeting with his family, but—apart from a few tears shed by one of his daughters—“little emotion was manifested by any of them. At parting, he kissed his wife and daughters but only shook hands with his two boys.”
On the evening before his execution, Lapage received a visit from his spiritual advisors, the Revs. Mr. J. E. Barry and Mr. J. B. Millette. They prayed together in his cell until nearly midnight. No sooner had they taken their leave than Lapage—who had never wavered from his protestations of innocence—summoned the warden to his cell. Throwing himself to his knees and speaking in broken English, he tearfully confessed to the murder of the “two gals.” “After making his confession,” reported the
New York Times
, “he felt greatly relieved.”
When the two priests returned early the next morning, they found Lapage enjoying a hearty breakfast. After receiving the sacrament, he was led to the gallows, which had been erected in the corridor of the prison’s north wing. A large crowd was assembled at the foot of the scaffold. Among the witnesses was Josie Langmaid’s father, James, still devastated not only by his daughter’s murder but also by a second terrible blow: the death of his thirteen-year-old son, Waldo, who had succumbed to consumption only two months after Josie was killed.
At a few minutes past 11:00 a.m., Lapage was led to the scaffold by Sheriff Dodge, who—after reading aloud the death warrant—adjusted the noose around the prisoner’s neck, drew the black hood over his head, pinioned his arms, and sprang the trap. “A slight twitching of the legs was the only motion observable after he fell,” the Times reported. The officiating physicians, Drs. A. H. Crosby, C. P. Gage, and J. W. Barney, closely monitored his fading heartbeats. Nearly twenty minutes passed before he was pronounced dead. His corpse was then delivered to a local undertaker named Crow and interred in Blossom Hill Cemetery.
Two weeks later, a “party of young scamps” stole into the graveyard at midnight, unearthed the corpse, and left it hanging from a water pipe in the statehouse
yard, where it greeted the citizens of Concord, New Hampshire, the next morning, April Fool’s Day.
The Langmaid Memorial
Though the world at large has forgotten the horror perpetrated by Joseph Lapage, it seems unlikely that the people of Pembroke, New Hampshire, ever will, since they live with a constant reminder of it. In 1875, local townsfolk erected a memorial to the slain schoolgirl: a fifteen-foot stone obelisk located near the spot where her headless corpse was found. Regarded by aficionados of such things as one of New England’s most bizarre attractions, the monument is inscribed with the following tribute:
Also included are helpful directions to the precise spot in the woods where her decapitated head was found.
For those interested in paying a personal visit to the Langmaid Memorial, Eric Jones, author of New Hampshire Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities, and Other Offbeat Stuff (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2006), offers the following directions: “Follow Route 3 North out of the village of Pembroke for about a mile, then take a right onto Academy Road. The monument is 0.75 miles on the north side of Academy Road, just across from the Three Rivers School.”
Fifty years before a German physician coined the term “psychopath,” some of America’s greatest authors were portraying these cold-blooded, conscienceless criminals in their fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s classic horror story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, presents a frighteningly persuasive portrait of such a creature, a killer who derives keen sadistic pleasure from toying with his elderly victim before murdering and dismembering the harmless old man. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote repeatedly about the criminal type he called the “unpardonable sinner,” the man full of intelligence but devoid of conscience or compassion, who—with the malignant narcissism typical of sociopaths—sees other human beings as mere objects to be exploited for his own pleasure. And in his final masterpiece, Billy Budd, Herman Melville creates a diabolical character named Claggart who employs his “cool, sagacious” judgment to accomplish acts “that in wantonness of atrocity would appear to partake of the insane”: a description that applies perfectly to psychos such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy.
Melville viewed such evil as ultimately inexplicable—“a mystery of iniquity,” in scriptural terms. Searching for a more scientific theory, nineteenth-century psychologists came up with the concept of “moral insanity” (or “moral imbecility”) to describe the behavior of rational, intelligent individuals who use their cleverness and cunning to commit unspeakable crimes. The phrase was applied, for example, to the post–Civil War “boy fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy, America’s youngest serial killer, whose “sharp wits,” “knowledge of right and wrong,” and “above-normal intellectual capacity” coexisted with a complete “absence of moral sense and human sentiments and feelings.” It was also the label given to Jane Toppan, confessed poisoner of thirty-one victims and, until John Wayne Gacy, America’s most prolific serial murderer.
By the early twentieth century, however, psychologists had come to realize that while the expression “moral imbecile” might accurately describe the kind of criminal we now call a sociopath, it didn’t explain the cause of such aberrant behavior. In 1921, for example, two California psychiatrists, Ernest Bryant Hoag and Edward Huntington Williams, published a remarkable paper about a then-notorious, now long-forgotten “Bluebeard” killer named J. P. Watson, who confessed to murdering more than nine of his twenty-one wives (see
this page
). “To call such a man a ‘moral imbecile’ means nothing and leads to no solution to such problems,” the authors concluded. “We freely admit the entire inadequacy of such a diagnosis.”
In exploring Watson’s past, Hoag and Williams did discover one very interesting fact
about Watson, a classic sadistic sex killer incapable of empathy or remorse. On at least three occasions, he had suffered significant head injuries. At ten years old, “he had a blacksmith’s anvil tip over on him, pinning him to the ground with a considerable portion of the weight of the anvil resting on his head.” Some years later, “he was thrown from a motorcycle, striking the back of his head.” And in 1913, “he fell out of the upper berth of a steamship, again striking directly on the top of his head.”
At virtually the same time Watson was perpetrating his crimes, another West Coast serial killer was on the loose: Earle Leonard Nelson, the “Gorilla Murderer,” who strangled nearly two dozen women before he was finally captured. Interestingly, Nelson too suffered a severe head injury in his youth when he was thrown from his bicycle after being hit by a trolley car and ended up in a coma for nearly a week.
These and similar cases (like that of John Wayne Gacy, who developed a blood clot on the brain after being struck in the head with a playground swing as a boy) accord with the latest findings of neuroscientists exploring the sources of criminal behavior. Deploying state-of-the-art MRIs and other high-tech devices to scan the brains of imprisoned psychopathic killers, researchers such as Kent Kiehl of the University of New Mexico and Jim Fallon of the University of California have become convinced that damage to those areas of the brain responsible for compassion, inhibition, and moral choice can significantly reduce a person’s reluctance to harm others.
Even proponents of this theory, however, concede that other factors have to be present to turn someone into a serial killer. Extreme parental maltreatment is prominent among them. John Wayne Gacy, for example, might have suffered a brain injury, but he was also raised by a viciously demeaning father who subjected him to unrelenting ridicule and humiliation, creating in the boy a bottomless well of fury, hatred, and malice toward the world. Some genetic component might also be at work. In short, it appears to require a witch’s brew of three toxic ingredients to produce a serial murderer: damage to particular brain areas, extreme childhood abuse, and an inheritance of specific genes thought to be associated with aggression and violence.