Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (43 page)

Postcard of “Unexploded Dynamite Found in Ruins of Bath School”

Wired to a fence at the edge of the farm, investigators found a small wooden sign with these stenciled words: Criminals are made, not born. It was a final, self-justifying message from the psychopathic Kehoe, who seemed to be suggesting that he had become a killer through no fault of his own—that the townspeople had only themselves to blame for the horror that had befallen them.

L
IKE THE SITES
of other sensational killings, Bath became an instant tourist attraction, drawing hordes of the morbidly curious. According to one contemporary estimate, no fewer than eighty-five thousand cars passed through town on the Sunday after the catastrophe. After a titillating afternoon of viewing the wreckage of the school building and the scorched remains of the farm, many of the visiting voyeurs returned home with souvenir postcards showing the bushels of unexploded dynamite, the twisted remnants of Kehoe’s truck bomb, and the precise spot where his wife’s blackened corpse had been found.

Because nothing like the Bath disaster had ever happened before, there seemed to be no adequate language to describe it. One prescient pundit, recognizing that Kehoe’s mad act represented the advent of a uniquely modern form of violence, proposed adding a new word to the language. According to an item in the May 27 edition of the Lansing State Journal, an unnamed member of the editorial staff had “coined the verb ‘kehoe’ ” to cover any such future cases. “Applications of the idea would cause any person who destroys another or others by means of explosives to be termed a ‘kehoe,’ the act committed would be a ‘kehoe,’ while the victim would be considered as having been ‘kehoed.’ ”

Far from entering the language, Kehoe’s name quickly faded into obscurity. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the story was front-page news across the nation. Within days, however, it was supplanted by an event of far greater magnitude: Charles Lindbergh’s epochal flight across the Atlantic. When Lucky Lindy’s plane touched down at Le Bourget field outside Paris on the evening of May 21, the world erupted into celebration, leaving the stricken citizens of Bath to mourn and remember on their own.

F
ROM THE PROSECUTION OF
H
ARRY
K. T
HAW FOR THE SHOOTING OF
S
TANFORD
White in 1906 to the O. J. Simpson circus of 1995, nearly every decade in the hundred-year stretch between 1900 and the dawn of the new millennium witnessed a sensational court case touted as the “trial of the century.” Appropriately enough for an age of excess, the Roaring Twenties produced no fewer than three such extravaganzas: the 1924 trial of the college-age “thrill killers,” Leopold and Loeb; the 1926 trial of Mrs. Frances Hall for the double murder of her minister husband and his choir-girl mistress, Eleanor Mills; and the Ruth Snyder–Judd Gray “Double Indemnity” trial of 1927.

As it happens, another sensational homicide took place in 1927, one that bore striking similarities to the brutal slaying of Albert Snyder by his brassy wife and her milquetoast lover boy. While the Snyder-Gray trial remains one of the defining events of the era, however, the subsequent case—though it generated nationwide coverage at the time—has been largely forgotten, relegated to a mere footnote in the official histories of Jazz Age crime.

I
T WAS A SCENE
straight out of a Southern Gothic melodrama, one of those lurid B-movies set in the Louisiana swamps. On the night of July 6, 1927, three local trappers
were rowing a small skiff around Lake Poularde, deep in the heart of Cajun country. The men, armed with spears and a flashlight, were gigging frogs to sell to New Orleans restaurants.

Suddenly, as they navigated close to the bank, their boat bumped into something odd, “an obstacle apparently snagged by a submerged tree branch.” Whatever it was, its stench left no doubt that it was dead.

One of the men beamed the light on the object, revealing (in the words of historian Charles M. Hargroder) “a mass of what he first took to be the water-whitened carcass of an animal.” As the men peered closer, they were startled to see that the carcass was a partially clothed human body, its face eaten away by crabs, its belly slit open, its neck and feet weighted with heavy metal brackets—150-pound railroad angle irons.

Hastening back to town, the men notified Chief Louis Blakeman of the Morgan City police, who immediately roused the assistant parish coroner, Dr. C. C. DeGravelles. Before long, a small flotilla had returned to the scene and wrangled the loathsome remains onto one of the boats. The corpse was transported to the local mortuary. Thanks to the work of the crabs, the man’s face was so disfigured that he could be identified only by his distinctive club-shaped thumbs. He was Jim LeBoeuf, general manager of the local utility company, Morgan City Power & Light, and a pillar of the community.

Though LeBoeuf had been missing from his home for five days, no alarms had been sounded. When family members inquired about his sudden absence, his wife, Ada, had breezily told them that he was “probably on an out-of-town trip.” From the condition of the corpse, however, it was clear that LeBoeuf had been floating in the brackish lake all that time. He had been killed by two shotgun blasts to his left side, one just below the heart, then slit “from gullet to groin” by someone apparently skilled in field-dressing game.

Exactly how a corpse weighted with three hundred pounds of iron had floated to the surface was at first unclear, though the explanation soon became apparent. “The body had not floated at all,” writes one chronicler of the case. “Enormous floods on the Mississippi River in 1927 caused the water level in the lake to rise. The body, thrown into what was at the time deep water, was in shallow water when the river receded.” There were those, of course, who saw the matter in very different terms, as an act of divine providence: God’s hand abating the floodwaters to bring the dreadful deed to light.

I
T DIDN’T TAKE
long for suspicion to fall on Ada, a thirty-eight-year-old homemaker who, though no great beauty, “had that certain something” (in the words of one male observer). To casual acquaintances, she and Jim “were comfortably wed”—a respectable, modestly well-off couple occupying a decent two-story clapboard house in a good part of town. Their more intimate friends, however, knew that the marriage was troubled. Jim was a wildly jealous husband, resentful even of Ada’s female intimates, and he’d been known to express his displeasure with his fists.

In recent years, his deepest suspicions had focused on one person in particular: the LeBoeufs’ family doctor, Thomas E. Dreher. Married with three children, Dreher was one of Morgan City’s “sterling citizens,” as the papers described him—a “leading physician” who, in addition to his medical practice, was co-owner of the town’s largest drugstore, played a prominent role in civic affairs, and (as the papers proudly noted) had “once held high office in the Ku Klux Klan.”

Dreher and LeBoeuf had, in fact, been close friends at one time, going off together on frequent hunting and fishing expeditions. A few years before LeBoeuf’s gutted corpse was found floating in Poularde Lake, however, the two had a major rift. Its cause was an anonymous letter sent to Dreher’s wife. “Two nights ago,” it read, “there was a lady and a man in that empty shack in the bayou. One of them was Ada LeBoeuf and the other was your husband.”

In her shock and confusion, Mrs. Dreher—a “petite, dignified” woman utterly devoted to her husband—made an unfortunate decision. Not knowing what to do or where to turn, she paid a visit to Jim LeBoeuf’s office and showed him the letter. It was a fateful act, setting off a chain reaction that would climax with the destruction of three lives.

Given LeBoeuf’s hotheaded temperament, it’s no surprise that he was driven to new heights of jealous fury. Confronting Ada with the note, he reportedly laid into her with his fists and threatened to kill both her and her lover if the story proved to be true. Neighbors would later testify that, in the throes of his obsession, “he forced his wife to drive their automobile through the back streets of town while he crouched in the back seat with a shotgun, waiting for the hapless physician to speak to her.” It is certainly true that at one point he approached Chief Blakeman and “insisted that Dreher be prevented from driving past his home.” When Blakeman pointed out that
“he could not keep Dreher off a public street,” LeBoeuf vowed that if the physician ever attempted to contact his wife again, he would kill them both.

Throughout all this, Ada stoutly protested her innocence. As it happened, however, the information provided by the anonymous busybody—an unnamed “lady from across the tracks,” as Ada would later describe her—was more than idle gossip. Ada and Dr. Dreher really were carrying on a secret affair. And by the summer of 1927, Jim LeBoeuf—with his constant threats and unceasing vigilance—had become an intolerable obstacle to the two illicit lovers.

While insisting to the end that her friendship with Dr. Dreher was purely platonic, Ada herself later testified that her life with Jim had been unbearable ever since Mrs. Dreher showed him the anonymous letter. “Jim went wild,” she said. “Since that day, God only knows the agony I lived in. Jim forbade Dr. Dreher the house and forbade me to speak to him when he passed me on the street. My husband’s mind was poisoned. He saw meanings in the simplest doings of everyday life. At last, I came to the end of my endurance. I had to have it over.”

T
HERE WOULD BE
various conflicting accounts of exactly what transpired on the evening of Friday, July 1, 1927. All agreed, however, that the sequence of events that culminated in the mutilation murder of Jim LeBoeuf began earlier that day when Dr. Dreher got a note from Ada informing him that she and her husband would be out boating on Lake Poularde at around 8:00 p.m. There was general agreement on another point, too: that immediately after receiving this information, Dreher paid a visit to his friend Jim Beadle.

A plainspoken, rough-hewn “man of the soil” (as the local papers described him), Beadle earned his meager keep as a hunter and trapper. He was deeply loyal to Dr. Dreher, who was known for his generosity to his less prosperous patients, often treating them without charge in particularly tough times. Word had it that his benevolence to his hunting partner Beadle extended even further—that Dreher’s charity “kept bread in Beadle’s kitchen and his seven children in shoes.”

At around dusk on the evening of Friday, July 1—just a few hours after Ada’s letter was delivered to Dreher’s office—a teenager named Morris Trahan was sitting on his front porch when the doctor’s automobile drove by on the way to Lake Poularde with Dreher behind the wheel and Jim Beadle in the passenger seat. Lashed to the
side of the car was Beadle’s green pirogue—a lightweight flat-bottomed boat resembling a dugout canoe, a standard piece of household equipment in that watery part of the country. What Trahan couldn’t see, of course, was Dreher’s double-barreled shotgun lying on the rear seat.