Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (41 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
“You have not the wings of an eagle,
Nor from me can you fly,
No human hand can aid you,
Pearl Bryan you must die!”
“What have I done, Scott Jackson
That you should take my life?
You know I’ve always loved you,
And would have been your wife.”
Down on her knees before him,
She pleaded for her life,
But into her snow white bosom
He plunged a fatal knife.
“Farewell my loving parents,
My happy peaceful home,
Farewell my dear old schoolmates,
With you no more I’ll roam.
“Farewell my dear, dear sister,
My face you’ll see no more,
Long, long you’ll wait my coming,
At the little cottage door.
“But Jackson, I forgive you
With my last and dying breath.”
Her pulse had ceased its beating,
Her eyes were closed in death.
The birds sang in the morning,
But doleful were their songs,
A stranger found Pearl Bryan
Cold headless on the ground.
The tear-jerking ditty of Pearl Bryan belongs to a genre that folklorists call the “murdered-girl ballad,” a type of traditional song about a trusting young woman done in by a cold-hearted seducer. Scholar Eleanor R. Long-Wingus has identified four central elements that make up the murdered-girl ballad formula:
1. An innocent young woman is seduced by an unscrupulous lover.
2. When she becomes pregnant, he arranges a tryst on the pretext of discussing plans for their marriage.
3. Over her protests, he succeeds in luring her to a remote area.
4. Though she begs for mercy, he kills her in a particularly vicious manner, then disposes of her body.
The best-known of all American murdered-girl ballads is “Poor Naomi Wise” (aka “Omie Wise”). During the folk music craze of the late 1950s—when the pop charts were ruled by clean-cut vocal groups warbling “This Land Is Your Land” and every self-respecting baby boomer could strum the chords to “Kumbaya”—the song was a coffeehouse standard. Scores of artists, ranging from Bob Dylan to Elvis Costello, have recorded it. Inspired by a real-life murder that happened in Randolph County, North Carolina, in 1807, the ballad exists in many versions, though the earliest known printed lyrics are these:
Come all good people, I’d have you draw near,
A sorrowful story you quickly shall hear;
A story I’ll tell you about N’omi Wise,
How she was deluded by Lewis’s lies.
He promised to marry and use me quite well;
But conduct contrary I sadly must tell,
He promised to meet me at Adams’ springs;
He promised me marriage and many fine things.
Still nothing he gave, but yet flattered the case.
He says we’ll be married and have no disgrace,
Come get up behind me, we’ll go up to town,
And there we’ll be married, in union be bound.
I got up behind him and straightway did go
To the banks of Deep River where the water did flow;
He says now Naomi, I’ll tell you my mind,
Intend here to drown you and leave you behind.
O pity your infant and spare me my life;
Let me go rejected and not be your wife;
No pity, no pity, this monster did cry;
In Deep River’s bottom your body shall lie.
The Wretch then did choke her, as we understand,
And threw her in the river below the milldam;
Be it murder or treason, O! what a great crime,
To drown poor Naomi and leave her behind.
Naomi was missing they all did well know,
And hunting for her to the river did go;
And there found her floating in water so deep,
Which caused all the people to sigh and to weep.
The neighbors were sent for to see the great sight,
While she lay floating all the long night;
So early next morning the inquest was held;
The jury correctly the murder did tell.
Like other specimens of the genre, “Poor Naomi,” while based on an actual homicide, takes considerable liberties with the truth. Though the historical record is scanty, scholars have determined that—far from being a virginal maiden brought to ruin by a heartless cad—the real Naomi Wise was a household menial of dubious “carnal conduct” who had already borne two illegitimate children before she became involved with her eventual killer, a younger man named Jonathan Lewis. After getting pregnant by Lewis—a well-to-do clerk from a respectable local family—the shameless Naomi, evidently proud that she was with
child by a man of “so high rank as Jonathan,” let the world know that he was the father-to-be. Infuriated at being exposed to disgrace—and worried that he would have to support the child under Kentucky’s “bastardy” laws, which required fathers of illegitimate babies to put up money for the future maintenance of their offspring—Lewis “charged Naomi upon peril of her life to remain silent.” When she blithely ignored his warnings, he lured her to a river and drowned her. Arrested and jailed, Lewis managed to escape and remained at large until his recapture four years later. He was ultimately tried and acquitted for lack of evidence, though it is said that he confessed to the murder on his deathbed.
The most complete account of the case is Robert Roote, “The Historical Events Behind the Celebrated Ballad, ‘Naomi Wise,’ ” North Carolina Folklore Journal 32, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1984): 70–81. For more on the subject of murdered-girl ballads, see Eleanor R. Long-Wingus, Naomi Wise: Creation, Re-Creation, and Continuity in the American Ballad Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: Chapel Hill Press, 2003) and Anne B. Cohen, Poor Pearl, Poor Girl! The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973).
“Sleuth-Hound of the Law”
At the time of its occurrence, the slaying of Pearl Bryan was trumpeted in the press as “the most diabolical, cold-blooded, premeditated outrage ever committed in a civilized community”—“a murder so horrible and revolting as to appear to place it beyond the civilization of today,” “one of the most terrible tragedies of the nineteenth century.” Nowadays, hardly anyone remembers it. In this respect, the Bryan case is typical of many murders that dominate the front pages for a while, only to fade from public memory. But it’s not just the crimes themselves that are quickly forgotten. Often the celebrated lawmen who solve them are too.
Such is the case with the once legendary Cincinnati detective, Cal Crim. Christened David Calvin Crim at his birth in 1864, he was raised in a Maryland orphanage and moved to Cincinnati at the age of fifteen. At the time, according to historian Catherine Cooper, “crime in the city was rampant. The year before his arrival, police arrested more than 1,300 prostitutes and 2,000 drunks, and it was discovered that for years thieves had been stealing bodies from the Colored Cemetery and selling them to medical schools. Brutal murders shocked the community. By January 1, 1885, the jail held twenty-three accused murderers.” One of these cases—the savage bludgeoning murder of a livery owner by his two young employees—triggered the worst rioting in the city’s history when a mob of ten thousand citizens, outraged over the lenient sentence given to one of the killers, ransacked the courthouse and set it on fire in March 1884. The riots—which lasted three days, until they were quelled by the combined forces of the sheriff’s department, city police, and state and local militias—left fifty-four people dead and more than two hundred injured.
Two years after the courthouse riots, Crim—who had worked his way up from shoeshine boy to bellhop to desk clerk at a luxury hotel—joined the Cincinnati police force as a patrolman. He made a rapid ascent through the ranks and was supervising the vice squad (or “Purity Squad,” as it was known at the time) when he was called in to investigate the Pearl Bryan case. His brilliant work on the case, which led to the arrest, conviction, and execution of the killers, first brought him to national attention and won him renown as an ace “sleuth-hound of the law.”
Five years later, he was shot twice while attempting to apprehend a notorious sneak thief, John Foley, whose favorite street-fighting tactic—a vicious head butt—had earned him the nickname “Foley the Goat.” By then, Crim was such a revered figure that a year later, following his lengthy recovery, the grateful citizens of the community chipped in to buy him a home.
Though he would carry two bullets inside him for the rest of his life, Crim never slowed down. In 1913, after twenty-eight years on the force, he retired from public service and founded the Cal Crim Detective Bureau, the first private detective agency in Cincinnati. Still in existence today (under the name Cal Crim Security), the company “solved many murders, kidnappings, and lesser crimes” and played a major investigatory role in the notorious Black Sox baseball scandal of 1919, “for which Cal received a gold-plated lifetime pass to any major league ballpark,” as Catherine Cooper writes.
In 1953, Cal Crim died at the age of eighty-nine, forgotten by the world at large but still esteemed among crime cognoscenti as “Cincinnati’s super-sleuth.”
[Source: The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan, or: The Headless Horror (Cincinnati: Barclay & Co., 1897).]
[Source: Catherine Cooper, “Cincinnati’s Super-Sleuth,” Cincinnati Magazine 16, no. 11 (August 1983): 96.]
THE WORLD’S WORST DEMON”
T
HE ANNALS OF CRIME PROVIDE GRIM CONFIRMATION OF THE SCRIPTURAL SAYING
“There is no new thing under the sun.” In April 1995, anti-government fanatic Timothy McVeigh committed the most heinous act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Four years later, almost to the day, a pair of teenage sociopaths, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, turned their Colorado high school into a killing field, making its name synonymous with adolescent mass murder: Columbine.
To a stunned American public, both these enormities seemed symptomatic of specifically contemporary social ills: the proliferation of right-wing extremists dedicated to the overthrow of the federal government, the epidemic of random school shootings by disaffected, gun-obsessed teens. Seventy years earlier, however, a crime occurred that combined the most appalling aspects of both the Oklahoma City catastrophe and the Columbine massacre (with an added element of another modern-day terror, the suicide bombing). It was known as the Bath School Disaster.
T
HE PERPETRATOR OF
this outrage was a man named Andrew P. Kehoe, who would forever after be known by a variety of epithets: “fiend,” “monster,” “maniac,” and—in
the phrase of his earliest chronicler—“the world’s worst demon.” Born outside Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1872, one of thirteen children of a prosperous farmer, Kehoe was from his earliest years an inveterate tinkerer who enjoyed experimenting with electricity “the way other children indulged in sports.”
Following the death of his beloved mother in 1890, Kehoe enrolled in Michigan State College in East Lansing, where he studied electrical engineering. Though biographical details are vague, he appears to have transferred to a school in St. Louis, where he reportedly suffered an unspecified head injury that left him in a coma for almost two weeks—a trauma that may or may not have contributed to his subsequent descent into homicidal mania. At all events, after some years of drifting around the Midwest, working as an electrician, he returned to the family farm in 1905.
By then, his sixty-year-old father had taken a much younger wife, Frances, toward whom Kehoe developed an intense and reciprocated loathing. In September 1911, an incident occurred that was viewed as a tragic mishap at the time, though it would take on a far more sinister aspect in light of subsequent events.
Returning from an afternoon outing, Frances set about making dinner preparations. When she put a match to the oil stove, it exploded, engulfing her in flames. Kehoe, hearing the explosion and his stepmother’s shrieks, ran into the kitchen, grabbed a pail of water, and doused her with it, which only caused the burning oil to spread over her body, “liquefying what little skin she had left.” Her “muscles roasted to the bone,” she died in agony a few hours later, “little more than a blackened lump.” The tragedy was attributed to a defect in the stove. Only later, when the world learned exactly what Andrew Kehoe was capable of, would people come to believe that he had deliberately rigged it to explode.
K
EHOE REMAINED A
bachelor until the age of forty, when he married thirty-seven-year-old Nellie Price, a local woman he had known since their undergraduate days at Michigan State. Seven years later, they bought an eighty-acre farm, putting down half the $12,000 purchase price and taking out a mortgage for the balance. Shortly thereafter, they moved into their new home in the township of Bath, a tight-knit little farming community situated about twelve miles from Lansing.