Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (38 page)

He never made the trip.

That very afternoon, even as Harry was returning from the church, assistant county attorney Albert H. Hall got a remarkable letter from an elderly attorney named Levi M. Stewart, one of the city’s most prominent men and a close family friend of the Haywards. In it, Stewart revealed that, three days prior to the Ging homicide, he had received a visit from Harry’s older brother Adry, “a pathetically dependent man of thirty-two” (in the words of one historian) who worked in his father’s real estate office for a pitifully small salary and was always in need of money.

Adry was in a highly agitated state. “He told me,” Stewart’s letter explained, “that Harry and a confederate were going to murder Miss Ging in order to get money from her life insurance … and he wanted to know what could be done to prevent it.”

Stewart was incredulous. “I hadn’t the least belief that there was any foundation for his fears and told him it was only some of Harry’s big talk.… I repeated to him again and again that while Harry was wicked he was not a fool, and that he certainly would not have given himself away in advance in that way if there had been any intention to perpetrate such a crime.”

Adry, however, was adamant, insisting that “the murder was certainly planned and would be accomplished in a very few days.” Events, Stewart now sadly conceded, had “proved conclusively that Adry was right.”

“If I had supposed there was the most remote possibility of his story, or rather belief being founded on a genuine intention to commit a crime, I should have advised him at once to go to the superintendent of police and lay the matter before him, but I had no belief whatever in its being anything but bluster and bluff on the part of
Harry.… I knew long ago that Harry was one of the most mendacious liars and dishonest rogues I had ever seen, but I had no idea of his being such a criminal.”

Hall lost no time in showing the letter to his superior, state’s attorney Frank M. Nye. A few hours later, both Harry and Adry were arrested and locked up in the Central Police Station.

At first, Adry was tight-lipped. Under advice from Levi Stewart, however, he finally opened up about his brother’s diabolical scheme.

O
NE AFTERNOON
in early September, Adry was at work in his father’s office when Harry dropped in and, after a bit of aimless chitchat, asked if Adry “wanted to make good money” by performing a simple task.

“I am always willing to make good money, but it depends upon what it is,” said Adry.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Harry then explained that he was prepared to give Adry $2,000 if he “would kill a woman.” It would be “a very simple thing.” Harry would “get her out somewhere, take her out driving or something like that,” and all Adry had to do was shoot her. Since Adry had no connection at all to the woman—whose name Harry did not reveal at the time, referring to her only as “the dressmaker”—“nobody would ever suspect me of the crime.”

When Adry refused, Harry derided him for not having “any nerve.”

“I have nerve enough,” said Adry.

“Prove it,” Harry sneered. “Go out and kill somebody and I’ll give you a hundred dollars. If you are too afraid to kill a woman, kill a child. Or kill a cripple; they are better off dead than alive anyway.”

When Adry stood firm in his refusal, Harry stormed out of the office, declaring that he was “through with me, that I was no good.” Over the ensuing weeks, however, he kept Adry abreast of his plans. In early November, Harry revealed that he had persuaded his intended victim to take out life insurance policies amounting to $10,000 and make him the beneficiary. A few weeks later, on the day after Thanksgiving, he appeared in Adry’s office and announced that the time had come “to sacrifice the dressmaker.” By then, he had found someone to do the job that Adry was too “chicken-hearted” to perform. His name was Claus A. Blixt.

D
ESCRIBED BY ONE
historian as a “dim-witted immigrant,” the Swedish-born Blixt had come to America as a seven-year-old and settled with his parents in southeast Minnesota. He had spent the next twenty years on the family farm, where—after acquiring a threshing machine—he became adept at stationary engineering. Moving to Minneapolis in 1886, he worked at various odd jobs—bartender, streetcar conductor, steam engine operator at a rock quarry—before being hired as the handyman for the Ozark Flats. Forty-one years old at the time of the Ging murder, he and his third wife lived in the basement, where, among his other duties, he tended the furnace and kept the hydraulic elevator in working order.

Knowing an easy mark when he saw one, Harry immediately recognized that the simpleminded Blixt had the makings of a pliable tool. Throughout the fall of 1894, he made nightly visits to the basement and—using a combination of bribery, blackmail, and bullying—did everything in his power to bend the handyman to his will. By mid-November, Blixt had so fallen under Harry’s malign spell that, when challenged to prove his courage by setting fire to a barn across the road, Blixt readily agreed. According to some accounts, he also poisoned a neighbor’s dog at Harry’s behest as a further demonstration of his mettle.

Satisfied that Blixt was fully in his power, Harry broached the subject that was foremost on his mind: getting rid of Kitty Ging. He intended, he told Blixt, “to take her down.” Everything about her revolted him. “Whenever I go up to her room and she puts her arms around me,” he said, “I feel like putting a knife into the goddamned bitch.”

Blixt, who adored his third wife, was appalled. “If a girl loves you like that, how could you do such a thing? It is awful. I don’t understand it.”

“I would rather kill her than shoot a dog,” said Harry. “If there was a dog and her, I’d shoot her and let the dog go.”

His personal aversion to Kitty, however, wasn’t the most important consideration. Mostly it was a matter of money. He was “going to make ten thousand dollars on her,” said Harry, explaining his life insurance scheme.

“But Harry,” Blixt protested, “can’t you try to make money some other way than by killing the poor girl?”

But Harry would not be dissuaded. “Don’t you want to make some money easy?” he asked Blixt, proposing the same deal he had offered Adry: $2,000 to “kill the woman for me.” When Blixt refused, Harry accused him of cowardice and promised to have him arrested for arson. “You know that barn you fired for me? I can have you sent to prison
for ten years for that. You must help me if you want me to keep quiet.” It wasn’t until Harry issued the ultimate threat, however—“If you don’t help me, I will kill your wife”—that a tearful Blixt relented.

Harry’s first, outrageously gruesome plan was to orchestrate an elevator “accident.” He would get in the elevator with Kitty, he explained, and knock her senseless from behind with a hammer. He would then arrange her body so that her head was “over the edge of the elevator.” At a signal from Harry, Blixt—who did nighttime duty as the elevator operator—would “start it up and it will tear her head off.”

When Blixt recoiled in horror and insisted that he “would not do any such thing,” Harry contrived a less ghoulish scheme. Certain aspects of it, known only to Harry, would forever remain a mystery. On the evening of December 3, the day he had set for her death, Harry met with Kitty and laid out the details of a supposedly surefire moneymaking deal he had set up for that night. Kitty—in thrall to the seductive sociopath and never averse to fattening her bank account, even by questionable means—agreed to help out. At 7:00 p.m., she hired a buggy and drove it to the corner of Lyndale Avenue and Kenwood Boulevard, where Harry had arranged to meet her. She was surprised to find him accompanied by another man, introduced by Harry as “one of the gang.” It was, of course, Claus Blixt, who—unbeknownst to Kitty—had been fortified with a half pint of whiskey and equipped with a Colt revolver.

Ordering Blixt into the buggy, Harry gave them directions, telling the two of them to drive out to “the west side of Lake Calhoun,” where he would meet them with another team. They would then “exchange horses” before proceeding with their mission—a necessary precaution, he explained, to “confuse anyone trying to follow us.”

As Kitty and Blixt drove off into the night, Harry hurried by foot to Mabel Bartelson’s home, picked up his date, and escorted her to the opera house. He and Mabel were enjoying the show when Blixt, following Harry’s instructions, drove Kitty to a deserted spot, shot her in the back of the head, dumped her body into the road, abandoned the buggy and took a streetcar back home.

B
LIXT DID NOT
reveal all of this information at once. Taken into custody on Friday, December 7, he initially claimed total ignorance of the murder. On the following day, after intense grilling, he altered his story, claiming that he had been a mere accessory to the crime, helping to dispose of the corpse after Harry had done the killing. It wasn’t until
the following day that he broke down and made a full confession. On December 13, both he and Harry were indicted for murder. Adry was not charged.

T
HOUGH ALL BUT
forgotten now, the trial of Harry Hayward was a nationwide sensation—“one of the greatest legal battles the world ever saw,” in the estimation of one contemporary chronicler. Having been whipped into a “fever of excitement” by the frenzied attention accorded the case, the public turned out in droves for the opening day of the proceedings, January 21, 1895. The scene, wrote one reporter, “would have cast in the shade a Republican convention in a presidential year.” More than five thousand people jammed the streets around the courthouse, waiting to see the prisoner escorted from the jailhouse a half block away. At their first glimpse of Harry, they broke into catcalls and chants of “Hang him! Hang him!”—a sentiment seconded by Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnelly, who expressed his belief that “Harry should be hung at once, and if he is acquitted, the public had better turn out and hang his attorneys.”

Though the seven-week trial got off to a slow start, with the first nine days devoted entirely to jury selection, it produced its share of memorable moments. Particularly dramatic were the testimony of Claus Blixt, which held the audience spellbound for nearly three days, and the riveting revelations of Adry. “Never before on the witness stand,” exclaimed one reporter of Adry’s recital, “was there ever such a story told for mortal ears!” Harry’s defense team—hired at great expense by his doting father, who had sold off much of his property to pay the legal expenses—attempted to discredit Adry’s devastating testimony by showing that he was insane. In the end, however, the jury needed less than three hours to reach a guilty verdict. Three days later, on March 11, 1895, he was sentenced to death.

C
ONFINED TO HIS
cell in the Hennepin County jail while his appeal made its way through the courts, Harry maintained the air of cool bravado that had served him so well at the gaming tables. He joked with his jailers, charmed visiting journalists with his “cordial and gentlemanly” manners, and—notwithstanding two attempted escapes—professed perfect contentment with his surroundings. His sleep was deep and untroubled, his disposition serene, and his appetite so hearty that he began to grow seriously stout. The prospect of hanging seemed to hold no terror for him. He made wisecracks about his
impending “necktie party” and speculated humorously about “what his sensations at the last moment would be.”

On only one occasion did Harry’s affable façade crack open, exposing the madness beneath. Ever since Adry’s testimony against him at the trial, Harry had made no secret of his “unbounded hate” for his brother. Finally, at the urging of his heartbroken parents, he agreed to send for Adry and reconcile with him. Penning a brief note, he dispatched it to Adry’s home via a messenger:

The note turned out to be a trap. No sooner had Adry arrived than Harry began to berate him in a tone that grew increasingly maniacal as he went on.

“I will be with you, Adry, as long as you live,” he cried. “I will haunt you to your last day. You will see me every night for the rest of your life. You will see me as a corpse with the rope around my neck. I will make life a living hell for you. How do you like it?

“Ah, this is glorious!” he shrieked, striding back and forth across the cell and waving his arms wildly. “If I could have your brains, Adry, I would stick them on an iron and roast them in the fire. I would clench them in my hands and tear them to pieces. This is my forgiveness!”

As his horrified brother leapt to his feet and hurried from the cell, Harry shouted after him: “Goodbye, Adry. I will meet you at the gates of hell!” For nearly an hour, he continued to pace up and down his cell, exclaiming “in exultant tones how he had fooled Adry into coming to hear his curse.”