Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (35 page)

So forthright and sincere was Carlyle’s manner that his neighbors could not help but believe him. His mistake was chalked up to his overly trusting nature, and he continued to be welcomed into the best homes in Ocean Grove.

O
NE EVENING DURING
Carl’s first summer in Ocean Grove, he attended a dance at the Coleman House, a sprawling beachfront hotel in Asbury Park. It was there that he first set eyes on Helen Neilson Potts. A vivacious eighteen-year-old who had just graduated from high school with honors, Helen was the beloved only daughter of doting parents: a well-to-do-father, George Potts, who had made his fortune in railroad construction, and a mother, Cynthia, whose primary concern was keeping a watchful eye on her high-spirited daughter.

Carl, already a practiced seducer, instantly set his sights on the radiant young woman. “She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw,” he would later recall. “She was tall, with remarkably large, dark eyes, an olive complexion, and possessed that crowning glory of all, a mass of chestnut hair.” Before the evening was out, the handsome young medical student had won her over with his smooth-spoken charm.

Within weeks of that fateful first meeting, Carl had become a regular visitor to Helen’s stately Ocean Grove home. That summer, they were seen everywhere together—boating excursions, tennis parties, picnics on the beach. They also spent hours in private, during which Helen—though deeply infatuated with Carl—doggedly rebuffed his increasingly importunate sexual demands.

In the fall of 1889, the Potts family rented an apartment on West Sixty-third Street in Manhattan so that Helen, a gifted pianist, could begin classes at the New York College of Music. In the meantime, Carl returned to his medical studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons on West Fifty-ninth Street. Working just a few blocks from the Pottses’ new residence, he was constantly coming by to spend time
with Helen. “We were always pleased to see him,” Mrs. Potts would later testify. “We were homesick, and it seemed like seeing someone from home.”

Even so, as her daughter and Harris saw more and more of each other, Mrs. Potts began to have misgivings. Sometime that November, after Carl had passed yet another long Sunday afternoon in Helen’s company, Mrs. Potts took him aside. “I said I thought he was coming rather often, more so than I approved of,” she later recounted. Though she regarded him as “a very pleasant friend,” she felt “it was wrong to call as often as he was calling.” She worried that “something might grow of the friendship that would be a disadvantage” to her susceptible daughter.

Carl seemed taken aback at the implication that he might have dishonorable designs on Helen. Looking at Mrs. Potts in a “frank, open, innocent way,” he “assured her so candidly that nothing could be further from his thoughts” that Mrs. Potts “was ashamed at having spoken of it.”

Though Carl “promised to call less frequently,” his pursuit of Helen continued unabated. In January 1890, Mrs. Potts felt compelled to speak to him again. She was shocked when Carl brought up the subject of marriage. “You cannot be engaged to my daughter,” she exclaimed. “She is fond of you, but you are still a medical student, and Helen is much too young to think of such a thing. I am glad that the two of you are friends, but you must not call on her with any such idea.”

Seemingly chastened, Carl assured Mrs. Potts that he would put all such thoughts out of his mind. But as was so often the case with the duplicitous young medical student, he was telling a lie.

A
T AROUND TEN
o’clock on the morning of February 8, 1890, Carl called at the Pottses’ home and asked permission to take Helen downtown to see some of the sights in lower Manhattan. Mrs. Potts had no objections. When the couple returned at around three, they sat down in the front parlor with Mrs. Potts and told her all about their outing. After visiting the New York Stock Exchange and Richard Morris Hunt’s magnificent Tribune Building, they had lunched at an elegant restaurant, and had an altogether delightful time.

In earnest tones, Carl then asked permission to remain there with Helen for the rest of the afternoon. The request was made so courteously—and Helen seemed so eager for his company—that Mrs. Potts could not bring herself to refuse. For the
next few hours, while the older woman busied herself with her household tasks, the handsome young couple sat beside each other on the sofa, chatting merrily, though occasionally their voices would drop and they would whisper together in excited, conspiratorial tones.

T
HAT WOULD BE
the last time Mrs. Potts saw the two of them so happy together. Over the next few weeks, as she later recalled, she “noticed a difference in Carl’s manner towards my daughter. He did not call as frequently as he used to, nor was he as pleasant as he had been.”

Though Mrs. Potts was by no means displeased over the apparent cooling of the relationship, she was concerned about her daughter, who seemed deeply distressed about Carl’s sudden indifference. In an effort to reassure the girl, Mrs. Potts suggested that the young man was merely preoccupied with his studies. The end of the school year, however, brought no change in Carl’s strange new behavior. Though he continued to call on Helen at the Pottses’ summer home in Ocean Grove, “he did not make himself nearly as courteous and agreeable as he had been. When there were musicals or concerts or anything of the kind, he did not care to go. He made appointments with my daughter to take her out to church twice and did not keep those appointments. His manner was as if he was bored and tired of their friendship.”

One afternoon in early June, Carl arrived at the Pottses’ home and invited Helen for a walk. Though Mrs. Potts expected them back in an hour or so, Helen did not reappear until that evening. As soon as she walked in the door, her mother was struck by how “pale and ill” she looked. Assuming that her daughter had been stricken with one of her recurrent “sick headaches”—as migraines were called back then—Mrs. Potts asked why she had “taken so long a walk.” Without answering, Helen headed upstairs, got into bed, and stayed there until the next morning.

She was still feeling unwell the following week when she arranged to go visit her uncle, Dr. Charles Treverton, in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

M
ARRIED TO
C
YNTHIA
Potts’ sister, Charles W. Treverton was relatively new to his profession, having gotten his degree from Bellevue College less than six years earlier. It didn’t require long years of medical experience, however, to see that there was something seriously wrong with Helen. Pallid and weak, she had virtually no appetite
and suffered severe bouts of nausea, especially in the mornings. Despite her illness, she was unwilling to let her uncle examine her. Given her reluctance and the nature of her symptoms, Treverton believed he knew what was wrong. When she finally agreed, his suspicions were confirmed. His niece (as he put it) “was in the family way.”

But that was hardly the most startling revelation. Tearfully, Helen spilled out the truth. The previous February, on an afternoon when her mother believed that she was off on an innocent outing in downtown Manhattan, she and her companion, Carlyle Harris, had actually gone to City Hall and gotten secretly married under assumed names. In June, after learning she was pregnant, Harris had persuaded her to undergo an abortion at his hands—a procedure that, judging from her current condition, the young medical student had clearly bungled.

Treverton immediately dashed off an indignant note to Harris, summoning him to Scranton at once. When Harris arrived by train a few days later, he displayed none of the emotions—worry, guilt, contrition—Treverton expected. He spoke as if the secret marriage and subsequent abortion were the most natural things in the world and breezily explained that he had performed the same procedure on five previous girlfriends, all of whom had recovered “very nicely.” He was surprised to learn that Helen was unwell. Though “there was a good deal of hemorrhage at the time” of the operation, he “thought that he had removed everything that was there” and assumed that “this matter of her sickness was all over.”

Treverton was taken aback by the young man’s blasé tone, especially after Harris declared that he had brought along his valise of surgical implements in anticipation of doing a follow-up procedure on Helen. Treverton let it be known that he had no intention of allowing the young cad to participate in any further operations on his niece.

It was a conversation that took place the following day, however, that revealed the true depths of Carlyle Harris’ depravity. Eager to do a little sightseeing while he was visiting Scranton, Harris persuaded a young man named Charles Oliver to take him on a tour of some nearby coal mines and steel mills. On their way back that evening, Harris, for whatever unaccountable reasons, began boasting of his amorous exploits, telling Oliver that he “had had sexual intercourse with a great many women.” He then proceeded to explain “that it was a very easy matter to administer a strong drink of intoxicating liquor with a glass of ginger ale. When it had its effect, he had no trouble in getting his desire with the women.”

True, there had been two instances where this method hadn’t succeeded. In both
those cases, he had “overcome the women’s scruples by a secret marriage ceremony.” The first time he had resorted to this expedient, things had worked out well for him. After impregnating the young woman (whose identity would never be disclosed), he had performed an abortion on her, after which she disgustedly declared that “she wanted nothing more to do with him.”

Helen Potts, of course, was the second of his secret wives. As with the first, he had married her solely to get her into bed. Once she had given herself to him, he immediately lost interest in her.

H
ARRIS REMAINED IN
Scranton for less than a week. As soon as he left, Treverton focused his full attention on Helen, who had taken a turn for the worse. Assisted by an older, more experienced colleague, Dr. D. B. Hand, Treverton administered a combination of drugs intended to induce labor. Two days later, a decayed fetus, four or five months old, emerged from Helen’s womb. As far as Treverton and Hand could judge, it had been dead for several weeks. There was a wound on its partially decomposed head, evidently made by the implement wielded by Carlyle Harris during the botched abortion.

Helen remained at her uncle’s home for the rest of the summer, slowly regaining her strength. Later, it would emerge that during her convalescence Carl took up with another woman, a beautiful twenty-year-old named Queenie Drew, who traveled upstate with him to Canandaigua, New York, where they spent several nights together in the fanciest hotel in town, sharing a bed.

I
N MID
-A
UGUST
, M
RS
. Potts, in response to an urgent telegram from her brother-in-law, traveled to Scranton, where she finally learned the shocking truth about her daughter’s secret marriage and the clumsy abortion that had almost cost Helen her life. Under the tender ministrations of her mother and the watchful care of her uncle, Helen made a complete recovery. By the first of September, she was well enough to travel back home to Ocean Grove.

By then, Carlyle Harris had returned to his grandfather’s home in the city. Since his visit to Scranton, he had made no effort see his wife. As the fall approached, Mrs. Potts—who had kept the news of the marriage from her husband “because she could
not bear to tell him of their daughter’s shame”—grew increasingly agitated over the situation. Finally, in early October, she arranged to meet Harris in New York City.

Over lunch at a downtown restaurant, she demanded to know why Carl had married her daughter in such an underhanded fashion. His explanation was so outrageous that, for a moment, Mrs. Potts merely gaped at him in dumbfounded silence.

“I did it that way for this reason,” he said with his usual nonchalance. “I thought we might someday get tired of each other, and if we were married under false names, we could just drop the matter and no one would be the wiser.”

“With my daughter!” Mrs. Potts finally sputtered. “You were going to drop the matter once you got bored with her? I call that legalized prostitution! I insist that you be made a legitimate marriage under your right names.”

Harris assured his mother-in-law that he would obey her wishes, though he asked for a brief delay since he was just beginning his new semester at the medical college and had to concentrate on his studies. In the meantime, he urged Mrs. Potts to bring Helen to New York City and enroll her at the select Comstock School for Girls on West Fortieth Street (the school’s alumni included the future Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt). He “expected to make a good position in New York,” Carl explained, and Comstock would “train Helen for the society he hoped they would live in.”

Two months later, on December 8, 1890, Helen became a pupil at the school.

D
ESPITE HIS PROMISE
to Mrs. Potts, Harris continued to find reasons for putting off the ceremony she had demanded. By mid-January 1891 her patience had run out. “Now listen to what I say,” she wrote to him on the eighteenth of the month. “The 8th of February will be the anniversary of your secret marriage. I set that day as the day on which you shall go to a minister of the Gospel and be married in a Christian manner.”

On January 20th, Harris penned a reply, assuring her that “all your wishes shall be complied with.”

That same afternoon, he appeared at a pharmacy on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Broadway and wrote out a prescription for six capsules, each to contain four and a half grains of quinine and one-sixth grain of morphine. Two days later, he gave four of the capsules to Helen, who had been troubled with her sick headaches, instructing her to take one each night before going to bed. He retained the other two
capsules himself. The following morning, Harris left town for a week’s vacation, taking a steamer to the Old Point Comfort resort on Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay.

On Saturday morning, January 31, Mrs. Potts took Helen on a shopping expedition to Macy’s. The two then returned to the Comstock school, where they had lunch. Afterward, Mrs. Potts accompanied Helen to her room, where her daughter showed her the box of pills Carl had given her. She had taken three of the capsules so far, she explained, “but they made her feel so ill” that she was “tempted to throw the last one out the window.”