Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (34 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
Her death on March 30, 1883, was witnessed by 125 spectators—a fraction of the number that had clamored for passes to the singular spectacle. Handsomely attired in a black cambric dress made especially for the occasion, she ascended the scaffold with firm steps and a stolid demeanor. “May God forgive you all for hanging me, an innocent woman,” were her final words. Her neck broke instantly when she plunged through the trap, though it took twelve minutes for her heart to stop beating. Such was the public’s ghoulish fascination with the case that, in its account of the execution, the Free Press published the minute-by-minute record of her subsiding pulse rate. In the following days, one early collector of what we now call “murderabelia” wrote to the prison, requesting one inch of the hangman’s rope, “properly certified,” for his collection of crime relics.
Emeline’s last request was that her body be returned home for burial. Fearing the fury of his neighbors, however, her husband refused, and her corpse was interred in the prison cemetery. Ten years later, on November 18, 1893, her son Almon died of tuberculosis after a prolonged illness.
One hundred and twenty-five witnesses—the number that packed the prison yard when Emeline Meaker was put to death on March 30, 1883—might seem like a sizable crowd. Extrapolating from historical precedent, however, one may safely assume that a far greater number would have shown up if her execution had been held in public.
Four decades earlier, in a sensational case, a Bennington farmer named Archibald Bates was sentenced to death for “the barbarous murder of his sister-in-law by shooting her through the head with a rifle ball as she was sitting in her room, nursing her babe in the dusk of the evening” (to quote one early Vermont historian). When Bates was hanged atop Bennington Hill on February 8, 1839, fifteen thousand spectators showed up and turned the occasion into a “gala affair.”
Revulsion against such “disgusting open-air spectacles” had been building for a number of years. In April 1834, “Pennsylvania became the first state to legislate against public hangings,” writes Professor Negley K. Teeters in his fascinating book Hang by the Neck: The Legal Use of Scaffold and Noose, Gibbet, Stake, and Firing Squad from Colonial Times to the Present (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1967). “New Jersey was not far behind, on March 3, 1835, followed by New York on May 9 of the same year and Massachusetts on November 4. New Hampshire followed on January 13, 1837.”
The festive atmosphere surrounding the Bates hanging prompted Vermont lawmakers to join this growing list. Shortly after his execution, the state legislature abolished public hangings and decreed that all subsequent executions take place within the walls of the Vermont State Prison at Windsor. A pair of wife murderers, Sandy Kavanaugh and William Barnett, became the first two criminals executed under the new law when they were hanged together in the prison yard on January 20, 1864. Nineteen years later, Emeline Meaker became the tenth.
For reasons perhaps best explained by Freudian analysts, untold millions of loving, Iaw-abiding wives and mothers find few things more titillating than true-life tales of so-called monster moms: seemingly ordinary married women who cold-bloodedly murder their own children. Infamous recent examples of such modern-day Medeas include Susan Smith, the South Carolina divorcee who killed her two young sons by strapping them into their car seats and sending the vehicle into a lake, and Andrea Yates, the Houston housewife who methodically drowned her five small children in a bathtub.
As with every other kind of unspeakable crime, however, there is nothing new about this one. In our own country, the earliest recorded instance of such maternal mania goes all the way back to the days of the New England Puritans. In the early 1600s, a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, named Dorothy Talby—held by her neighbors in “good esteem for godliness”—began showing signs of extreme mental instability after giving birth to her fifth child, a daughter christened with the bizarre name “Difficulty.” From our own perspective, it seems clear that Mrs. Talby was suffering from a textbook case of postpartum psychosis. Her contemporaries, however, had a different diagnosis: Satanic possession.
In June 1637, authorities ordered her chained to a post for physically abusing her husband, John—“laying hands on him to the danger of his life,” in the language of the time. Unsurprisingly, this treatment failed to achieve a cure. When she continued to commit “misdemeanors against her husband,” she was first excommunicated, then ordered to be whipped. The tragic culmination of her brief tormented life occurred in September, when, ostensibly acting under orders from God, she murdered little Difficulty by breaking the infant’s neck. Brought before the Salem court, she refused to utter a word until threatened with slow torture, at which point she offered a full confession. Sentenced to be hanged, she asked to be beheaded instead but was sent to the gallows in December 1638.
To later New England writers, her case would stand as a prime example of the cruelly benighted attitudes that reigned in Puritan Salem. In his story “Main-Street,” for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne pictures “Dorothy Talby … chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offense than lifting her hand against her husband.” And in his survey “The Medical Profession in Massachusetts,” Oliver Wendell Holmes laments: “See poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at last, taking her own little daughter’s life; put on trial, and standing mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder … the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for today in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself.”
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Sources: John Stark Bellamy II, Vintage Vermont Villainies: True Tales of Murder and Mystery from the 19th & 20th Centuries (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2007); Martin Shipman, “The Penalty Is Death”: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002); Kerry Segrave, Women and Capital Punishment in America, 1840–1899: Death Sentences and Executions in the United States and Canada (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co., 2007).
]
W
HAT SERIAL MURDER IS TO OUR OWN AGE, POISON MURDER WAS TO
V
ICTORIAN
America—the signature crime of the era, reflecting its darkest anxieties. In a time before food and drug regulation—when doctors prescribed formaldehyde for the common cold, over-the-counter “cure-alls” contained opium and strychnine, babies were fed rancid “swill milk,” and U.S. soldiers were supplied with tins of tainted “embalmed beef”—the figure of the secret poisoner personified the culture’s worst nightmare, the fear of ingesting something toxic with every bite of food or spoonful of medicine.
Of course, not every jealous lover, embittered spouse, or disgruntled servant who relied on arsenic or cyanide to satisfy a long-simmering resentment achieved nationwide infamy in nineteenth-century America. To become a true newspaper sensation, a poison case had to include some additionally juicy element, preferably a generous dollop of sexual titillation. It was just such a combination of irresistibly lurid ingredients that made the Carlyle Harris case one of the most notorious crimes of 1890s America.
I
N THE FORMAL
photographic portrait that appears on the title page of his published trial transcript, twenty-three-year-old Carlyle Harris is the very picture of Victorian
respectability. With his slicked-down center-parted hair, pince-nez eyeglasses, and prim little moustache, he looks as dignified and upright as the high, stiff collar of his dress shirt. Indeed, it was the extreme disparity between his impeccable façade and his profoundly amoral character that made him such an object of appalled fascination to his contemporaries. If ever there were a real-life Jekyll and Hyde, it was Carlyle Harris.
Carlyle Harris murder pamphlet (
Courtesy of New York State Historical Association Library, Cooperstown.
)
He had the kind of background that would have made interesting fodder for psychoanalysts, had any existed back then. At a time when there was a serious social stigma attached to divorce, his parents split up during his boyhood, and Carl—as he was known to intimates—was taken to live with his mother, a formidable individual. Known to the public by her pen name, Hope Ledyard, she was a best-selling author of children’s books, as well as a popular lecturer on a range of topics, including religion, homemaking, and childrearing, a subject about which she had unorthodox ideas. Believing Carl to be a singularly sensitive lad, she “denied him the companionship of the boys of his age in the neighborhood” (as the newspapers later reported), with the result that “his playmates were mostly girls.”
From Carl’s earliest years until the day of his death, Mrs. Ledyard was a constant, not to say overpowering, presence in
his life. That such extreme, if not suffocating, maternal devotion could breed in its recipient hostile feelings toward the female sex in general was a notion that would have seemed far-fetched in that pre-Freudian, mother-worshipping age.
With his dynamic mother as a model, Carl quit school at thirteen and worked at a variety of odd jobs. A few years later, he tried his hand at acting—a congenial vocation for a young man so gifted at dissembling. Though he showed some promise in his first role—a French revolutionary in the historical melodrama Paul Kauvar at the Standard Theatre in Manhattan—he was forced to abandon the stage at the insistence of his mother, who (as she later wrote in a memoir) was “very much averse” to the theatrical profession. For a while, he drifted from job to job—as an assistant purser at a steamship company, a clerk for a sugar importer, a book salesman.
It was through the offices of his maternal grandfather, Dr. Benjamin W. McCready, that Carl finally found his calling. An emeritus professor at Bellevue and one of the country’s leading physicians, McCready encouraged his grandson to pursue a medical career, offering to pay his expenses and helping to secure his admission to New York’s prestigious College of Physicians and Surgeons. Carl entered the program in the autumn of 1888 and—working under the tutelage of the eminent surgeon Dr. Robert Abbe—quickly distinguished himself as a bright and conscientious student. By the end of his second year, he was assisting in the operating room. His particular field of interest was obstetrics and gynecology.
W
HILE
H
ARRIS LIVED
in Manhattan with his grandfather during the school year, he summered with his mother at the seaside resort of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a Methodist stronghold where Mrs. Ledyard offered lectures on the subject of temperance. To the neighbors, the handsome, well-spoken medical student seemed like a paragon of manly virtue. It would come as a shock, some time later, when the local papers reported that even while his mother was sermonizing on the evils of alcohol, young Harris was secretly operating a “rum and poker” joint called the Neptune Club in nearby Asbury Park, a place (as the press described it) “where men and women of questionable character congregated” and “orgies were a nightly occurrence.” He was arrested for keeping a “disorderly house” and spent a night in jail before being bailed out by his mother.
Still, with the cool aplomb characteristic of psychopathic personalities, Harris was able to convince the world that he was an innocent victim, guilty only of youthful
naiveté. Eager to earn money to pay his own way through medical school, he had borrowed $600 from his grandfather and set up a café in Asbury Park to cater to the summer crowd. At some point, he was approached by the proprietors of the Neptune Club, who offered to lease the second floor from him, “pay him a good rent, and guarantee him a hundred dollars’ worth of custom in his café.” Harris had leapt at the chance, never suspecting the truth about the den of iniquity operating directly overhead.