Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (51 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
Fact and Fantasy
A lovely young woman—courted by an older, physically repulsive, but enormously wealthy nobleman who has already married and lost several wives—overcomes her aversion to his off-putting looks and agrees to wed him. Not long after their marriage, he departs on a journey, leaving her the master key to all the locks in his castle and instructing her that she is welcome to enter any room except one: a “little closet at the end of the great gallery on the ground floor. Open them all,” he tells her, “go into all and every one, except that little closet, which I forbid you.”
No sooner has he gone, of course, than curiosity overcomes her and she sneaks into the forbidden chamber. As her eyes adjust to its gloom, she is assaulted by a fearful sight: “the floor was covered over with clotted blood on which lay the bodies of several dead women ranged against the wall.” These, she realizes to her horror, are the dismembered corpses of her husband’s former wives. When he returns from his journey and discovers her disobedience, he draws his cutlass and informs her that since she was so eager “to go into the closet,” she will remain in there forever, taking her “place amongst the ladies you saw there.” Only the timely arrival of her brothers, who ride to her last-minute rescue, saves her from becoming another butchered relic in the madman’s hideous trophy room.
This is the plot of the famous story “Bluebeard,” as recounted by the seventeenth-century French author Charles Perrault in his classic collection Contes du temps passé (Tales of Past Times), more commonly known as Mother Goose’s Tales. Some scholars have traced the origin of this gruesome story to various teal-life sources, particularly a sixth-century Breton chieftain known as Cunmar the Cursed, who was in the habit of decapitating his pregnant wives, and the depraved fifteenth-century French nobleman Gilles de Rais, who was ultimately hanged for the torture–murder of hundreds of young boys.
Other scholars see “Bluebeard” not as a historically based legend but as a version of an ancient and widely distributed type of folktale known as “The Bloody Chamber.” Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, contains a very similar story called “Fitcher’s Bird,” in which a young woman unlocks the one door that her wizard husband, before leaving on a brief journey, forbids her to enter in his absence. “But what did she see when she went in? A great bloody basin stood in the middle of the room, and therein lay human beings, dead and hewn to pieces, and hard by was a block of wood and a gleaming axe lay upon it.” When her husband discovers her transgression, he throws her down, drags her by her hair into the chamber, cuts off her head, and “hews her in pieces so that the blood ran on the ground. Then he threw her into the basin with the rest.” Another nineteenth-century folklore collection, Richard Harris Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends, features an analogous story in ballad form, “Bloudie
Jack of Shrewsberrie,” in which the heroine discovers a locked cabinet containing the amputated “wedding fingers” and severed “great toes” of the villain’s earlier, butchered brides.
Whatever its source—historical fact or archetypal fantasy—the name “Bluebeard” quickly became a byword. At times it has been used facetiously to describe the kind of metaphorical lady-killer who marries and dumps a succession of women, acquiring a new, younger bride whenever he tires of the older one. At others, it has served as a synonym for the kind of homicidal sex maniac we now call a serial killer. The protagonist of the 1944 movie Bluebeard, for example, is a sexually warped serial strangler who preys on beautiful young women in nineteenth-century Paris, and contemporary advertisements for the film made direct comparisons between the character and Jack the Ripper.
Nowadays, the term “Bluebeard” is used in a more restricted sense to describe a specific variety of psycho killer: the type who marries and murders a succession of wives. Unlike most serial killers, who tend to target random strangers, Bluebeards are, for the most part, only interested in doing away with their mates. They differ from the usual run of serial killers in another way, too. Though they undoubtedly derive sadistic gratification from their crimes, they are also motivated by financial greed. Wedding and bumping off a series of well-heeled (or heavily insured) women is their means of maintaining an affluent lifestyle.
The first American serial killer to be tagged with the “Bluebeard” label appears to have been Dr. J. Milton Bowers, a San Francisco physician accused of poisoning three of his wives between 1873 and 1885. A decade later, the nickname was attached to Herman Mudgett, aka Dr. H. H. Holmes, the notorious Gilded Age “multi-murderer” who perpetrated an indeterminate number of homicides at the time of the great Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. To his contemporaries, Holmes was a “modern Bluebeard” (as the papers called him) not only because he killed so many women—various girlfriends, mistresses, and fiancées—but also because his victims met their deaths within his Gothic “horror castle”: a massive turreted building equipped with all manner of bizarre features, from soundproof vaults and secret passageways to a medieval torture dungeon and a private crematorium.
The atrocities of another so-called modern Bluebeard came to light in 1920. The perpetrator was a seemingly mild-mannered, middle-aged Californian named J. P. Watson, who over the span of just three years managed to bigamously marry twenty-one women up and down the West Coast and murder at least nine of them. Though Watson made sure that each new wife signed her property over to him as soon as they were wed, he was, by his own admission, driven less by greed than by an irresistible homicidal compulsion—an overwhelming impulse to kill that would suddenly take hold of him and leave him, once he had bludgeoned his latest victim to death, “with a great sense of mental and physical relief and
an actual spirit of elation.” His confession revealed him to be a classic psychopath. “At no point during the narrative of his promiscuous murders, even when giving the most harrowing and revolting details, did he show the least emotion,” wrote the psychiatrists who examined him. “Moreover, he made no pretense of feeling any remorse.” The sheer enormity of his crimes, combined with his bizarre personality, made him, in the view of these experts, “the most astounding case of criminality ever known in America.”
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Sources: Evan Allen Bartlett, Love Murders of Harry F. Powers: Beware Such Bluebeards (New York: Sheftel Press, 1931).
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Copyright © Chris Stuart, Backcountry Music, BMI. Reprinted by permission of Chris Stuart.
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Sources: Maria Tatar, Secrets Behind the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jonathan Goodman, Medical Murders (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992); Ernest Bryan Hoag and Edward Huntington Williams, “The Case of J. P. Watson, the Modern ‘Bluebeard,’ ” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 12, no. 3 (Nov. 1921): 348–59.
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THE “AMERICAN TRAGEDY” KILLER
W
HEN SHE TRAVELED TO THE
A
DIRONDACKS IN MIDSUMMER,
1906, G
RACE
Brown—twenty years old, single, and several months pregnant—believed that she would return a respectable married woman. She had spent the past few months at her parents’ home, writing desperate letters to her boyfriend, Chester Gillette, her co-worker at an upstate shirt-collar factory. Terrified that her life would be ruined once her condition became obvious, she begged him to make her his lawful wife. “Oh Chester,” she wrote, “please come and take me away. I am so frightened, dear.”
Despite his professions of love, however, Chester seemed in no rush to settle down. In Grace’s absence, he had happily pursued other women, including a well-to-do beauty named Harriet Benedict. When Grace got wind of his dalliances, she threatened to expose him as a heartless seducer. If her life was ruined, she wrote, his would be too.
Her warning seemed to work. In early July, Chester invited her to join him on an Adirondacks vacation—a trip that would culminate in their wedding. Or so Grace assumed.
On the brilliantly sunny morning of July 11, 1906, the couple arrived at the Glen-more Inn, a picturesque hotel on the shore of Big Moose Lake in Herkimer County.
After checking in under an assumed name, Chester—carrying his suitcase and tennis racket—escorted Grace down to the water, where they rented a rowboat for the day.
Precisely what happened in the following hours will never be known. At various times during the afternoon, the two were spotted on the lake by other boaters. At one point they were seen picnicking onshore. When they failed to return at sundown, Robert Morrison, who had rented out the rowboat, was not especially alarmed. Tourists often misjudged the sheer size of the lake and, finding themselves too far away to make it back before nightfall, rowed to the nearest shore and spent the night at another inn.
It was not until the following morning that Morrison, by then seriously concerned, organized a search party. Setting off in a steamer, they scoured the lake and eventually came upon the rowboat, floating upside down on the water. Peering into the depths, one of the searchers spotted a strange object caught in the weeds on the bottom. Hauled up with a long, spiked pole, it turned out to be the drowned corpse of Grace Brown, her face and head savagely battered.
Three days would pass before Chester Gillette—still going under an alias—was arrested. At first he maintained that Grace had drowned accidentally when the boat overturned. Later he changed his story, claiming that, in her despair, she had deliberately thrown herself overboard. Neither explanation, however, accounted for the terrible wounds on her face, caused—according to the autopsy report—by a bludgeoning implement, very possibly a tennis racket.
Chester’s trial in November 1906 was a media sensation. Despite the uncertainties surrounding Grace’s death, the jury took only six hours to vote for a conviction. Sentenced to the electric chair, Chester went to his death in March 1908, still protesting his innocence.
For all its notoriety, it seems likely that the sad tale of Grace Brown and Chester Gillette would have faded into obscurity were it not for the great American author Theodore Dreiser. For years, Dreiser had been poring over the newspapers in search of a crime that embodied his own personal obsessions with sex and social ambition. In the figure of Chester Gillette, he found the perfect raw material for his literary purposes. The result was his 1925 masterpiece An American Tragedy. An enormous bestseller, the book brought Dreiser the fame and fortune he had always hungered for. He became even richer when the novel was made into a major Hollywood movie, released in 1931.
T
HREE YEARS LATER
, on the evening of July 30, 1934, Robert Allen Edwards—a clean-cut, church-going twenty-one-year-old whose striking good looks made him wildly popular with the opposite sex—took his former flame, a homely but vivacious twenty-seven-year-old named Freda McKechnie, for a drive to Harvey’s Lake, twelve miles west of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Children of respectable local families, Freda and Bobby (as everyone called him) lived next door to each other and had spent a great deal of time in each other’s company—far more time, in fact, than their parents suspected. Besides the usual small-town activities they attended together—church socials, Sunday school picnics, and the like—they had passed many a romantic hour in various secluded trysting places, including the town cemetery. Despite their age difference and the glaring disparity in their relative physical attractiveness, everyone assumed that the two longtime sweethearts would get married.
Bobby, however, had other ideas. Three years earlier he had gone off to a state teaching college, where he’d met a demure, musically inclined young woman named Margaret Crain, from a well-to-do upstate New York family. Though Margaret was, by all accounts, even plainer than Freda (one contemporary described her as possessing “about as much sex appeal as a pound of chopped liver”), Bobby found her entrancing. She, in turn, succumbed to his charms. Before long, they had embarked on a passionate affair.
With the country in the grip of the Depression, Bobby was forced to drop out of college in his junior year. Moving back in with his parents, he took a job at a coal mining company. By then, Margaret had graduated and was working as a high school music teacher in her hometown of East Aurora, New York. Separated by more than two hundred miles, they kept up a steady correspondence, exchanging frequent, fervent letters. Margaret also gave Robert money for a down payment on a car. Over the next year, he made regular weekend trips to her home, where he impressed her parents as an upstanding fellow and a fine prospective son-in-law.
What neither Margaret nor her parents knew, of course, was that during his time away from his true love, Bobby was still sleeping with the infatuated Freda McKechnie. Matters reached a crisis on July 23, 1934, when, during a visit to her family doctor, Freda learned that she was four months pregnant.
When she broke the news to Bobby the following day, he agreed to do the honorable thing and marry her. The date was set for August 1, a week away. Elated, Freda immediately broke the news to her family and began making preparations. Witnesses would later attest that they had never seen her so happy.