Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (4 page)

N
EAR THE START OF
C
ALEB
C
ARR’S
1994
BESTSELLER
T
HE
A
LIENIST
,
THE
narrator, John Moore—a reporter for the
New York Times
—visits the residence of the book’s titular hero, a psychologist named Laszlo Kreizler. A kind of nineteenth-century criminal profiler, the enlightened Kreizler holds to the theory, scandalous for its time, that psychopathic killers (as we’d now call them) are the product of severely abusive upbringings.

Finding Kreizler absorbed in some writing, Moore passes the time by perusing a book:

Carr, exercising the prerogative of a novelist, invents the name of Moore’s “favorite volume”; no book with that title is known to exist. Its subject, however, is no fiction. Indeed, Samuel Green, though long forgotten, was one of the most infamous American criminals of his time. His appalling career confirms the belief that today’s forensic psychiatrists share with Carr’s fictitious “alienist”: that, almost without exception, psychopathic killers are subjected to extreme and unrelenting cruelty as children.

I
N HIS OWN
time, when New England was still permeated by the grim spirit of Puritanism, Green’s lawless behavior was set down to “innate depravity.” Despite the best efforts of his “poor, honest parents” to “give him some education,” Green—born in Stafford County, New Hampshire, in 1797—was trouble from the start. “From his earliest childhood,” writes one nineteenth-century chronicler, “mischief was his whole study.”

It is clear from this account, however, that, in seeking to curb the boy’s unruly conduct, Green’s parents, along with other adult caretakers in his life, took the old adage “Spare the rod and spoil the child” to extremes. He was whipped for playing hooky and whipped for misbehaving at school. Apprenticed at eight years old to a blacksmith, he committed a petty theft, “for which he received a sound flagellation.”

He was later sent back to school, “but usually played the truant and was as constantly whipped.” On one occasion, he skipped school and went to the general store, where he shoplifted a mouth harp. “Returning home, his master whipped him for running away, and on the morrow discovered the theft; for which he whipped the boy again and sent him to restore his booty, with a promise that unless he returned in due time, he should be flogged once more. Green again transgressed, and his master kept his word.” The boy escaped “back home to his parents, who made him taste of the rod afresh and sent him back to his master, who applied the whip to his back once more.”

Nowadays, we have come to understand that brutalizing a child is a surefire way to turn him or her into a sociopath. If a person is hideously maltreated from the earliest years, it is almost guaranteed that he or she will grow up with a malignant view of existence. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based not on love and respect but on power and domination. Having been tortured by his primary caretakers, he will, in later life, seek to inflict torture on others,
partly as a way of taking revenge—of making other people suffer the way he has suffered—and partly because he has been so psychologically warped by his experiences that he can feel pleasure only by inflicting pain.

Some inkling of this truth appears to have entered the minds of Green’s contemporaries. “Perhaps, had mild measures been taken,” writes James Faxon, his first biographer, “reform might have been the result; but the scourge confirmed him in obstinacy and awakened a spirit of revenge in his bosom.” Even Faxon, however, concludes that the real problem was not the draconian discipline to which the boy was subjected but his own inborn character, his “stubborn and ugly disposition.”

Unsurprisingly, after years of relentless punishment and humiliation, young Green began displaying the symptomatic behavior of budding serial killers: juvenile sadism and precocious pyromania. On one occasion, he “drowned a dog in the family well.” On another, he “stabbed a swine.” He also tried to burn down his master’s house, “but the fire was discovered in time and the dwelling was saved.” For each of these acts, young Green was horsewhipped to within an inch of his life.

His already vicious behavior took its inevitable turn toward the homicidal when, in a fit of vengeful fury, he attempted to murder his master. The latter, we are told, “had a workshop, the door of which opened outward. Against this, the young desperado laid a heavy stick of timber on the inside, and on the top a broad axe, in the hopes that when his master opened the door, they would fall upon and destroy him.” As a backup, Green also “prepared the barn door in the same fashion, poising a pitchfork on the top, with the points downward.”

By good luck, Green’s intended victim escaped both of these booby traps alive, if not entirely unscathed. “The fall of the timber bruised his shoulder,” Faxon informs us, “and at the barn the pitchfork wounded his foot.” Neither injury proved sufficiently disabling to prevent Green’s master from administering a savage flogging to his young would-be murderer.

H
AVING NARROWLY AVOIDED
death at the hands of his incorrigible apprentice, Green’s master lost no time in ridding himself of the boy, who returned to the home of his now aged parents. Before long, Green fell in with a local crook who became his mentor in vice, “showing him how to break open shops and window shutters.” The older man “also gave him counterfeit money to pass, promising him half the profits.” The
wily Green proved an apt pupil, quickly disposing of forty-seven counterfeit dollars and—with the aid of a fellow delinquent named Ash—burglarizing a neighborhood shop of “merchandise to the value of an hundred dollars.”

From the scant historical record, it’s difficult to determine exactly how old Green was at this time. Evidence suggests, however, that—though already embarked on a career as a professional thief—he was still a preadolescent.

Along with their new criminal pursuits, Green and his accomplice, Ash, found plenty of time to perpetrate various acts of juvenile mayhem. On one occasion, while attempting to steal a rowboat, they were set upon by the owner, who “succeeded in laying his hands upon Ash.” Snatching up a large rock, Green struck the boat’s owner on the head, then broke his arm with the stone “as he lay on the ground.”

Some months afterward, when winter had set in, the two young reprobates came upon a group of children sledding down a hill “with great velocity” and threw a piece of timber under its runners, causing it to crash. “One boy had his arm and another his thigh broken,” reports Faxon. When the children’s schoolmaster, “a large man,” learned of the deed, he tracked down the perpetrators and “beat them severely.” In retaliation, Green and Ash armed themselves with clubs and waylaid the teacher as he made his way home one evening. After “felling him to the earth,” they “bound him, beat him, stripped him naked, and tore his clothes to pieces before his face. It was a very cold night but, notwithstanding, they left him thus with his hands tied behind his back.” Ash—described by Faxon as even more vicious than Green—wanted to slice off the man’s nose but, in a rare moment of compunction, “Green would not consent.”

H
AVING ROUSED
the fury of the law with their savage attack on the schoolmaster, the two hooligans fled town and took to the road. With their pockets full of “bad money,” they caroused through the New England countryside, bankrolling their debaucheries with the counterfeit bills, supplemented with the proceeds from countless burglaries and armed robberies. When Green wasn’t cheating at cards, drinking himself into a stupor, consorting with “abandoned women,” or breaking into houses to steal silverware and jewelry, he was busily seducing young girls, including one “daughter of a poor widow” he ruined after arranging to rendezvous with her at church. “Thus,” intones Faxon, “even in the temple of the Almighty, his depravity was proved.”

His sole redeeming feature was a small soft spot he harbored in his heart for his
mother. After one particularly successful burglary—a break-in at a “wholesale store” that netted him enough money to treat himself to a fancy new set of clothes along with a “fine horse”—he displayed his filial devotion in the single act of generosity he is known to have performed. During a brief visit home to his mother, reports Faxon, “he gave her a cow.”

Though “chiefly a burglar,” Green found ample opportunity to indulge his appetite for sociopathic violence. On one occasion, when a tavernkeeper caught Green and Ash trying to pass a bad five-dollar bill at his establishment and threatened to alert the authorities, they overpowered the man and attempted to throw him alive into the roaring fireplace. Only the timely “interference of his wife and servant maid,” who heard the commotion and raised the alarm, saved the man’s life. Not long afterward, the pair waylaid and robbed a traveling peddler, then—acting on Ash’s philosophy that “a dead cock never crows”—beat the man to death, “tied some large stones to the corpse and sunk it in a pond.”

Over the next few years—sometimes assisted by Ash but more often operating on his own—Green terrorized the Northeast, becoming in the process what crime historian Jay Robert Nash calls “America’s first Public Enemy Number One”:

Exactly how many homicides Green committed during this period is unclear, though certainly enough to qualify him as one of our country’s earliest serial killers.
There was one especially savage killing still to come. It would prove to be Green’s last.

W
HILE PASSING THROUGH
the town of Danvers, Massachusetts—the site, a century earlier, of New England’s infamous witch hysteria—Green got drunk, broke into a general store, and stole $30 in cash, along with “goods of all description.” Pursued by a posse, he was apprehended soon afterward, promptly tried, and sentenced to thirty days in solitary confinement in the state prison followed by four years of hard labor. Like all new inmates, Green was scrubbed, shaved bald, and clothed in coarse prison garb upon admission. He was then tossed into a dark, cramped cell furnished with a narrow cot, two threadbare blankets, and a bucket. Three times a day, attendants came around to feed him his meals of bread and water.

Emerging after thirty days, he was put to work breaking rocks in the prison yard. Before long, he made a failed escape attempt. For his trouble, he was outfitted with a heavy wooden clog shackled to his leg—a crude precursor of the ball and chain. He was forced to wear this torturous appurtenance for nine months. Several years were also added to his sentence.

Three years later, Green and several cohorts plotted to break out of jail. Their plan was foiled, however, when another prisoner, an African American named Billy Williams, got wind of it and informed the keeper. Vowing revenge, Green cornered Williams in a prison workshop and attacked him with an iron bar, shattering his arms, legs, and rib cage and breaking open his skull. Somehow, Williams managed to cling to life for a week.

At his trial for murder, Green insisted that he merely meant to beat the informer, not kill him—a claim clearly belied by the sheer ferocity of the assault. He was convicted and sentenced to die on the gallows—“a fate,” observes Faxon, “he had a thousand times merited.”

The execution took place on Boston Common on the morning of April 25, 1822. On the day of his death, Samuel Green was just twenty-five years old. For his contemporaries, the young malefactor was a kind of prodigy, whose energies, had they been put to better use, would have singled him out for high distinction. “The records of America—we may say, indeed, of the world—do not furnish the name of an individual who crowded so many crimes into so short a life,” concludes Faxon. “Nor have
we ever seen a more utter perversion of abilities which, properly directed, might have served and adorned the name of humanity.”