True Crime

The bright covering they found to be oilcloth, and the package was carefully tied up with good strong string.

They are fellows you might meet in any club or cigar store, or speakeasy.

American readers were inundated with crime stories during the hey¬ day of yellow journalism when, as A. J. Liebling recounts in his piece on a turn-of-the-century dismemberment-murder, newspapermen not only reported on crimes but conducted their own independent investigations.

His cockiness, his loquaciousness, his cleverness, his energy, his talents only made his life more mysterious and more repulsive.

The need to confess violent thoughts is softened by the cream of despairing sentiment, remembered hopes, perfect loves, and the incongruent beauties of the jungle.

Some ofthe actors attained silence by a murmuration of evasions; others by a bald statement that this was something which it would not be decent to allow the outside world to know about.

Where was his abattoir?

The torsos were further sectioned through the abdomen, the knife being carried in cases No. 3 and 6 through the intervertebral discs.

One (I quote from Dr. E. W. Cocke, State Commissioner of Institutions of Tennessee) diagnosed his mal¬ ady as “dementia praecox (insanity),” and the other decided that he was a “psychopathic personality (not insane).” Between the two he wrig¬ gled out of custody, and was soon engaged in crime again, with literary endeavor as a sideline.

He went accordingly, but soon returned, and was sworn as one of the coroner’s jury, the sitting of which was adjourned till the next morning.

News Letter, June 4, 1870 it’s all just manslaughter Practically there is no longer such a crime as murder in the first degree; it is all manslaughter.

Before I could reply with such words as “patricide,” “matricide,” “wealth,” “Beverly Hills,” she had thought over what she had said.

His dark hair, slightly kinky, made a tall pompadour.

Nonetheless, selecting so many unidentifiable persons seems a considerable feat.

Occasionally, when the police were on their infrequent rampages, a gang leader who was tem¬ porarily in bad odor with the authorities went about with his pockets sewed up, attended by a henchman who supplied him with cigarettes, matches and other articles which he might require.

Mitchell’s widely distributed narrative of the “horrid massacre” provided material for the following account by another of Beadle’s intimates, Timothy Dwight (1752-1817).

In February, 1910, she applied for parole because of her health, but it was decided that she was not eligible.

Next they descended at 1 a.m. upon three shantytowns in the Flats and Kingsbury Run.

Like Melville, Poe was gripped by the Colt-Adams affair and used its most ghoulish fea¬ ture—the victim’s salted corpse smuggled aboard a clipper in a packing crate—as the basis for his story “The Oblong Box.”

But union officials said a more complete dossier, including finger¬ prints, could be obtained from the National Maritime Commission in Washington.

It was quite evident from the shallowness of the wounds, the ability of the boy to resist his assailant, as shown by his successful warding off ofseveral blows with his hands, and other indi¬ cations of a violent struggle, that the murderer could not have been a man, and the wounds must have been inflicted by a person of little strength either of nerve or arm.

Why would a (tenuously) middle-class white woman with a good job thirtyodd miles away relocate to a town like El Monte?

Some of these early accounts detailed the misspent lives of pirates and frontier desperadoes, but their main focus was on the kinds of homicides Introduction • xiii that have always formed the central subject matter ofthe true-crime genre in its most typical form, and that in consequence make up the bulk ofthe present collection.

She broke down once—that was when she was again leading the way into the room where her husband was butchered, and where she claimed she saw Judd Gray astraddle of Albert Snyder in the bed.

He was visited by the Grand Jury, in a body, the next June, and in¬ formed by them that Mrs. Whipple herself had furnished sufficient proof of his guilt for conviction, and that his case was hopeless.

The shack faced the north, two small rooms setting east and west.

Naturally, Eastman became one of the most celebrated citizens of 308 • Herbert Asbury the East Side, and innumerable young men began to imitate him in speech and manner, so that there came into existence a Monk Eastman school of hoodlums and brawlers.

Independence who bayoneted a ship¬ mate after an exchange of words; the Harpes, a notorious pair of fron¬ tier robbers and murderers; Joel Clough, hanged for stabbing a widow who did not return his affections; and Jesse Strang, the besotted young man described below, who, at the instigation of his married paramour Elsie Whipple, shot and killed her elderly husband—an antebellum pre¬ cursor ofthe notorious Snyder-Gray case ofthe 1920s.

Even while insisting that he would never pander to the prurient interests of his readers, Franklin was not above providing them with titillating accounts of sex and violence, a considerable number of which involved domestic cruelty and murder: a father who, having taken his daughter to bed when his wife refused to...

While earlier newspaper publishers, including Ben¬ jamin Franklin, recognized the popular appeal of grisly murder stories and offered readers the occasional account of a particularly hideous slaying, no one before Bennett was so attuned to the publics interest in tales of crime and violence.

Microphones have been posted on the tables, and amplifiers have been rigged up on the walls, probably the first time this was ever done in a murder trial, but the apparatus wasn’t working any too well today, and one hundred and twenty newspaper writers scattered around the tables listened with their hands cupped behind their ears.

Mrs. Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray are on trial in the huge weatherbeaten old court house of Queens County in Long Island City, just across the river from the roar ofNewYork, for what might be called for want of a better name, The Dumbbell Murder.

Henry said he did, a statement which interested all the bootleggers present.

The result was the pioneering, documentary-style Dragnet, a huge hit on radio (1949-57) and subse¬ quently a staple of early TV.

He said nothing about mutilating her body after he had killed her but the upper portion of the body being so badly decomposed, it was impossible to tell whether the head had been cut from the neck or whether the vertebrae of the neck had separated from natural causes.

The officer had the body immediately conveyed to the station, whence it was taken to Undertaker Waterman, on Washington street.

The Irish bartender had the cowlick center part in his hair and the handle-bar mustaches that were tonsorial caste marks.

From the opening door of his cell he could plainly perceive every mechanical detail of the black gibbet, with its dismal hangings of sable muslin.

We are like the sans-culottes, like the knitting women watching the heads fall at the foot of the guillotine.

Hell Benders • 225 On May 5th, with a larger number of men, who were still of the opinion that the Benders were somewhat maculate, he returned, to find the neighbours already on the premises.

(This is a com¬ mon boast when Negroes rail against miscegenation.

In the vestibule just inside, an old man sits on the floor behind a display of old pocketknives and watchbands and billfolds and eyeglass cases offered for sale or trade.

Most newspaper accounts say that Karen Lamm and Kitty Menen¬ dez met in an aerobics class, but Lamm, who says she dislikes exercise classes, gave a different account of the beginning of their friendship.

Dr. Frank Ferguson, the Pathologist, Is Inclined Strongly to That Belief The same paper also presented an exclusive interview with former Police Inspector Alexander S. Williams, who said, inter alia: “The motive was revenge. . . . More than one person committed the crime. ... It was probably done by a German.”

...Scattered Dutchman 467 Zora Neale Hurston The Trial ofRuby McCollum 512 Jack Webb The Black Dahlia 524 Elizabeth Hardwick The Life and Death ofCaryl Chessman 536 Robert Bloch The Shambles of Ed Gein 549 Miriam Allen deFord Superman’s Crime: Loeb and Leopold 557 x • Contents W. T. Brannon Eight Girls, All Pretty, All Nurses, All Slain 578 Don...

Now, the murderer had emasculated the bodies of both Andrassy and the unidentified man (the genitalia were found near the bodies).

Fifteen years later, identical accounts of this sensational crime were reprinted in The New-York Weekly Magazine and the Philadelphia Minerva.

The outline of Gray’s confes¬ sion, which will be read today, indicates Gray says he dropped the weight after whacking Snyder once, and that Ruth picked it up “and belabored him.”

He was fighting, not for the lives oftwo miserable, maladjusted boys, but for the triumph ofreason and mercy over the barbarity of “a life for a life.”

Cheryl was also on the phone, calling her father, Stephen Crane, at his restaurant, the Luau.

Starting in the 1980s, his novels were rediscovered by a new generation of readers who found the hardboiled nihilism of his paperback crime novels irresistible, and many (including The Grifters, Pop.

Kleptomania has a deep underground connection with sexual aberrance, and it was the form that Loeb’s sexual disturbance naturally took.

As Alices first jury had found her guilty of manslaughter in the death of Missy, principles of double jeopardy prohibited her from being charged with a greater offence against her daughter, but the prosecution had compensated for that limitation by obtaining an additional indictment for the murder of young Eddie.

Four years went by, and the Hall-Mills case was almost forgotten by people outside of New Brunswick when, in a New Jersey court, one Arthur Riehl brought suit against his wife, the former Louise Geist, for annulment of their marriage.

There are a few caves in the moun¬ tains that have been used from time to time as shelters by shy vagrants, and in the last few years hippies have sometimes been seen along the rocky ridges strumming guitars and singing songs.

By contrast, the case of the young Jazz Age “thrill killers” Leopold and Loeb has never lost its fascination, inspiring works as varied as Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope (1929), filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1948, Meyer Levin’s barely fictionalized 1956 best-seller Compulsion and its subse¬ quent theatrical and movie adaptations, and the 1991 film Swoon.

The man was a swarthy Caucasian or a Mexican.

Plumbers, clerks, electricians, merchants, bakers, butchers, barbers, painters, salesmen, machinists, delicatessen dealers, garage employers, realtors and gardeners from the cities and the hamlets of the County of Queens were in the procession that marched through the jury box answering questions as to their views on the death penalty, and their sympathies toward women, and other things.

1781 39 Timothy Dwight “A crime more atrocious and horrible than any other” 45 The Record ofCrimes in the United States Jesse Strang 52 James Gordon Bennett The Recent Tragedy 63 Nathaniel Hawthorne “A show ofwax-figures” 69...

Subcon¬ sciously he sought the catharsis of indirect participation by reading of crime and playing the detective—even as you and I, the readers and writer of this book.

Robert Bosco, for exam¬ ple, sees it not as a work of objective reportage but as an expression of Franklin’s “personal contempt for every horrid, coarse sign of human depravity,” while Robert D. Arner places the piece in the context of Franklin’s other writings on temperance and believes it is meant to il¬ lustrate the evils of dram-drinking, the frightening potential of alcohol to turn ordinary people “into monsters unknown to themselves and unrecognizable by their better natures.”

Then they played with the idea of taking on their close friend Dick Rubel, with whom they had lunch three times a week, but vetoed him because his father was a notorious tightwad.

...he gains the confidence and probably the friendship of his victims before killing them. . . . The murderer was probably motivated by either a true insanity of the schizophrenic type or else a border-line insanity, a constitutional psychopathic state, accompanied by aberrant sexual drives.”

...Gunness 204 The Murder at Fall River 205 Trail’s End 207 Thomas S. Duke Mrs. Cordelia Botkin, Murderess 210 Edmund Pearson Hell Benders, or The Story of a Wayside Tavern 217 Damon Runyon The Eternal Blonde 235 Herbert Asbury from The Gangs of New York 303 Alexander Woollcott The Mystery ofthe Hansom Cab 317 Contents • ix Joseph Mitchell...

But he appears to have spent most of his time across the river, in the Roaring Third Police Precinct back of Public Square in downtown Cleveland.

Gray, a spindly fellow in physical build, entered the court room with quick, jerky little steps behind an officer, and sat down between his attorneys, Samuel L. Miller and William L. Millard.

They set out together in a buggy with a single horse.

In the days of the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, and later when Dandy Johnny Dolan ofthe Whyos was the fashion plate of gangland, the gangster was a big man; but in the course of years the misery and congestion of tenement life took their toll, and police and prison records show that the average gang member of the time of the Gophers, the Eastmans and the Five Pointers was not more than five feet and three inches tall, and weighed between 120 and 135 pounds.

...them. . . . The murderer was probably motivated by either a true insanity of the schizophrenic type or else a border-line insanity, a constitutional psychopathic state, accompanied by aberrant sexual drives.”

Despite the mass of circumstantial evidence against him, he was acquitted at his 1833 trial.

Thanks largely to Bennett’s graphic re¬ porting, the story became a nationwide sensation, America’s prototypical media circus.

She was put to bed and given heavy 594 • W. T. Brannon sedation, while a uniformed policeman took a seat in front of her door.

Sometimes she was a little lonely, perhaps, when he was tossing afar off on the sea, setting or hauling his trawls, or had sailed to Portsmouth to sell his fish.

He wrote, “Were these deaths due to sexual perversion (sadism) there would have been multiple body laceration and other mutilation as de¬ scribed by Dr. H. S. Martland ... in considering the Whitechapel murders in London.”

The World had to take some account of her views, although it did so with patent unenthusiasm; he would have made an anticlimactic victim, despite a halfhearted effort on the part of the editors to supply him with a mysterious past before his arrival in this country.

A meeting between Eastman and Kelly was arranged, and a few days later the gang leaders came face to face in the Palm, an unsavory dive in Chrystie street near Grand, Kelly having been guaranteed safe conduct at the request ofthe Tammany politicians.

It is particularly the peculiar dissection of the bodies which groups these seven cases together.

Wallace escaped, but the patrolman knocked Eastman down with his nightstick, and when the gang leader regained con¬ sciousness he was in a cell in the West Thirtieth street station, and had been booked on charges of highway robbery and felonious assault.

But he had left about 30 minutes before, carrying a bundle and saying casually that he was going out to a laundromat.

Our joy at the mutilation of old Hulton has been deeply unspeakable; our lively interest in the shooting and hacking of and by the Dudleys, Ingham and Miller, has been testified in a novel and interesting manner by a private scalp dance at our own apartments.

Maybe he was nervous, excited beyond his wont, and there was reason for thinking so: this body, alone among all, was eviscerated.

In a trial like this, under the conditions not only provided but insisted upon, so much that should come into the picture never comes into the picture, and so much that is of no real exculpatory or explan¬ atory character is kept out.

Occasionally she fingered the black jet beads at her throat, and she always leaned forward slightly, the white chin pushed out belligerently.

They were from all parts of Long Island, and the other boroughs of the large and thriving City of New York, the inmates of which are supposed to be so very blase but who certainly dearly love their murder cases.

In support of this he argued that the incision would have filled with blood and that the deepest portion of the contused wound was below the former, accounting in this way for the large quantity of blood on the north wall, which he said had been thrown out by the contused wound and passed over the foot of the bed.

Thanks largely to the sensationalizing efforts of William Randolph Hearst, the Cordelia Botkin case became one of the most widely publi¬ cized crimes ofthe 1890s.

Another habitue was Frank Dolezal, previously questioned by Merylo.

The Press editorialized on page one: “Unusual means must be taken to bring the detection of one of the most horrible killers in criminal history ... it is uncomfortable . . . this shuddering horror . . . must be caught for the peace of mind of the city and its good name abroad.”

...Remarkable Case ofArrest for Murder 72 Ambrose Bierce Crime News from California 80 Mark Twain from Roughing It 87 vii viii • Contents Anonymous Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend 98 Lafcadio Hearn Gibbeted 117 Celia Thaxter A Memorable Murder 131 Jose Marti The Trial of Guiteau 156 Thomas Byrnes The Murder ofAnnie Downey, alias “Curly Tom” 171 Frank...

The kitten was badly mutilated and was taken from him, when he said he was only playing with it and that it was his little baby.

It was a coeducational dorm, a circumstance which would have horrified the parents of college students two decades earlier, and John Stickney hated the arrangement.

All LAPD can say is that its detectives have exonerated every man and woman whom they’ve talked to, including the scores who insist to this day that they are guilty.

He was one of thousands of kids hampered by 724 • Ann Rule dyslexia and therefore unable to read well; words appeared backward or upside down or jumbled to him.

“On all subjects, from aviation to xylophone playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas.”

Many new people, new sounds and elements, had intruded so quickly upon what had been familiar to the old blind man on the ranch that he could not distinguish the voices, the foot¬ steps, the mannerisms as he once had; and without Ruby Pearl on the ranch each night, Spahn’s view of reality was largely through the eyes ofthe hippies or the wranglers, and he did not know which of the two groups was the more bizarre, harebrained, hallucinatory.

My mother had been strangled at an unknown location and dumped into some bushes next to the athletic field at Arroyo High School, a mile and a half from the Desert Inn.

The World had to take some account of her views, although it did so with patent unenthusiasm; he would have made an anticlimactic victim, despite a halfhearted effort on the part of the editors to supply him with a mysterious past before his arrival in this country.

The file was a mishmash: envelopes, Teletype slips, handwritten notes and two copies ofthe Detective Division Blue Book, an accumu¬ lation of reports and verbatim interviews.

Freeways were being widened, and it was necessary to literally blast away sections of mountain rock to ac¬ commodate them.

A few citizens seemed kindly disposed toward jury service, possibly because they haven’t anything at hand for the next few weeks, but they got short shrift from the lawyers.

...been cornered; Robberies are looking up; Assaults, active; Forgeries, dull; in Confidence-games there has been no move¬ ment since the late operation by the Young Mens Christian Associa¬ tion; Embezzlements are quiet; some improvement is looked for with continued favorable White Pine developments; Murders, neglected; Juvenile delinquencies are lively; Election frauds, out of season; Cus¬ tom House, ditto, command...

...your custody, was 128 • Lafcadio Hearn found guilty of deliberate and premeditated murder of one William Dawson, in manner and form as found in a true bill of indictment by the grand jury on the 30th day of October, 1875; and whereas the Court aforesaid, at the term aforesaid, to wit: on the 12th day of May, 1876,...

The cause for his wonderfully cruel proceedings is beyond the con¬ ception of human beings—the deed so unpremeditated, so unpro¬ voked, that we do not hesitate to pronounce it the effect of insanity —yet upon the other hand, when we reflect on the equinimity of his temper, and the comfortable situation in which he was, and no visible circumstance operating to render him frantic, we are apt to conclude, that he was under a strong delusion of Satan.

Perhaps his pro¬ ficiency goes back to his early youth and much practice pointing the accusatory digit and saying, “Teacher, he done it.”

To the ill-concealed rapture of the reporters, a skeleton was trundled into court as a model whereby to convince the jury that Caesar Young would have had to be a contortionist to have pulled the trigger himself, as Nan implied he did.

Roughing It • 93 CHAPTER XLIX An extract or two from the newspapers ofthe day will furnish a photo¬ graph that can need no embellishment: Fatal Shooting Affray.—An affray occurred, last evening, in a billiard saloon on C street, between Deputy Marshal Jack Williams and Wm.

Elabo¬ rating on Plato, Sigmund Freud argued that violent lawbreakers make it possible for the rest of us to adapt to the demands of normality by acting out, and being punished for, our own unacknowledged impulses.

Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders, 1926 DAMON RUNYON The murder of Albert Snyder by his wife, Ruth, and her mousy “loverboy” Judd Gray was one of the most sensational crimes in a decade that, having already produced the Hall-Mills and Leopold and Loeb cases, seemed to witness another “Trial ofthe Century” every few years.

He described finding the axe under the granary and said there were blood stains on the handle but none on the blade; that when he exam¬ ined it he found several hairs sticking to one side of the cutting edge which he picked off and turned over to the sheriff.

Without Robert’s incriminating statements, with only his admission to Detective Powell that he had blackjacked Freda after she died accidentally, the state’s case against the defendant was far from airtight.

Pounded out by underpaid hacks, the stories in these fact-based crime monthlies were almost always formulaic and forgettable, although, on rare occasions, pieces by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson would appear in their pages.

That was asserted, nevertheless, and fre¬ quently asserted yesterday, by spectators of the execution.

All Manhat¬ tan lay visibly at their feet, and it accentuated their cockiness.

He told how Gray had subsequently given this same narrative to a stenographer and identified and ini¬ tialed the various articles used in the commission of the crime.

In the fourth place, the Butcher operated upon his cadavers as a surgeon would.

In its sheer nihilistic savagery, it seemed to epitomize a decade in the throes of a violent social breakdown.

Everything had to be read because The Dahlia’s butcher might just be the egocentric who would delight in needling the police.

Duke’s anthology makes an even more prom¬ inent appearance in The Thin Man, where an entire entry on the Colo¬ rado “man-eater” Alfred G. Packer is reprinted verbatim.

He was anesthetized by preoccupation.

So he and Leopold, under Dickie’s leadership always, committed petty thefts, devised a 562 • Miriam Allen deFord system of cheating at bridge, set small fires and turned in false alarms, perpetrated acts of vandalism.

The defense has turned up a host of experts who proclaim him to be demented.

Until Lizzie Bordens father and stepmother received their famous whacks on the sweltering afternoon ofAugust 4, 1892, the most notori¬ ous axe-murder case in the annals ofNew England crime was the atroc¬ ity committed in 1873 on Smutty Nose, one of the small, barren Isles of Shoals, a rugged archipelago ofsmall islands ten miles offthe coast of New Hampshire.

History ofPlymouth Plantation, 1651 COTTON MATHER Unfairly or not, Cotton Mather (1663-1728) has come to epitomize many of the least attractive traits of the colonial Puritan, from excessive selfrighteousnessto persecutive zeal.

Bobbie’s blood had seeped through the lap-robe and the upholstery was spotted with blood.

Samuel L. Miller, representing Gray, charged that the confession of the corset salesman was secured while he was under duress and by intimidation and threats.

During the interval after the first hearing, Mr. James secured, in Michigan, such convincing affidavits as to the identity of Mrs. Griffith that the County Attorney abandoned the prosecution against both women and obtained their discharge.

Among true-crime aficionados—“murder fanciers,” as he himself called them—the acknowledged American master of the genre in the early 20th century was Edmund Lester Pearson.

Hazelton made a point of a clause in the policy that bore Snyder’s signature, reserving the right to change the beneficiary.

Ben¬ nett was happy to give the public what it wanted, providing extensive and extremely graphic coverage of the most shocking crimes of the day, most famously the 1836 hatchet murder ofthe prostitute Helen Jewett.

He went berserk in his little house, smashing his fist through a wall, slamming doors, then rushing out into the backyard in nothing but his undershorts, where he ran through the night screaming, “God is going to punish me!”

In 1926, he moved on to the Providence (R.I.) Journal and Evening Bulletin, where—apart from a hedonistic year in Paris at his father’s expense—he spent the next four and a half years, “ooz[ing] prose over every aspect of Rhode Island life” (as he put it).

Heroic, no doubt, and commendable; but in homely, substantial common sense, the act of Senor Carillo transcends it, even as the solid merits of the comestible by which it was wrought surpass the flippant virtues of an omelette souffle.

Writing the book was only mildly cathartic; transmogrifying Jean to Betty left one woman still unrecognized.

Caesar Young, that was a nom de guerre, his real name was Frank Thomas Young—was a gay blade of the racetracks, a bookmaker, gambler, and horseman, personable, rich, generous, jovial, English.

For a few moments, I was lost to admiration at the extraordi¬ nary sight—a beautiful female corpse—that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity.

The rest of the trial was anticlimax.

Hanging from the wall behind him, or resting on the mantel, were psychedelic portraits of him done by the girls, and on a nearby table was a guitar, and on another wall was the tapestry of a horse that Manson had given him.

He half uncovered the ghastly corpse.

That it had accomplished more than at first anticipated was generally conceded. indianola, April 10.—(Special.)—All day long Margaret Hossack and her children have sat in the court room listening to the terrible arraignment of the defendant by Attorney McNeal, who is closing the argument for the prosecution.

“But they grabbed me and guzzled me and put me to the floor.”

Edgar Hazelton, a close-trimmed dapper looking man, with a jut¬ ting chin and with a pince-nez balanced on a hawk beak, who repre¬ sents Mrs. Snyder, did most of the questioning of the talesmen for the defense.

For the defense the humbler Abraham Levy had been retained—the mighty Abe Levy who looked like a happy blend of cherub and pawnbroker and who, as the most adroit and zestful practitioner of the criminal law in this coun¬ try, was called for the defense in more than three hundred homicide cases.

Some scholars are also inclined to believe that Poe’s pioneering mystery story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was at least partly in- Introduction • xv spired by a bizarre report in 1834 about an orangutan trained to burglar¬ ize apartments.

In every way he was precocious—but precocious as a forced plant is, which grows awry, develops brilliant premature blossoms, and from root to leaf-tip is subtly malformed.

Baltimore Evening Sun, December 3, 1934 THEODORE DREISER As early as 1892, while working as a reporter in Chicago, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) began to notice a recurrent type of crime that he regarded as symptomatic of America’s obsession with “money success.”

Reason demands that his life be spared, because of the futility of his horrendous act and because killing the monster is an inadequate way of ending nature’s power to grow monsters—for, in the end, moved by prolonged solitude and fear and watered by tears, the gnawed-away man may revive deep within his body, and in these days of wrath jus¬ tice might appear to be vengeance.

Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend, 1875 LAFCADIO HEARN Though best known for his books about Japan, where he spent the last 14 years of his strange and peripatetic life, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) began his writing career as a city newspaper reporter specializing in lurid crime stories.

The resourceful Telegram, ever on the lookout for a sporting angle, promoted the candidacy of “a heavy bettor named McManus, who has not been at the track for five or six days,” under a headline that read: RACING MEN WILL VISIT THE MORGUE The Evening World, in its Night Extra, which was relatively safe from Hearst plagiarism, offered a stimulating speculation by still another medical man, under the headline 504 • A. J. Liebling WAS IT CANNIBALISM?

The body when brought to the undertaker’s was quite stiff, but the abdominal muscles were flaccid, indicating that the boy had been dead but a few hours.

Haddon Gray and a friend named Harry Platt went to see Judd at the Onondaga and Judd said he had not kept the “date” in Albany as a telegram from Momsie had reached him there summoning him on to New York.

Caesar Young, that was a nom de guerre, his real name was Frank Thomas Young—was a gay blade of the racetracks, a bookmaker, gambler, and horseman, personable, rich, generous, jovial, English.

The three fishermen were hungry, not having touched at their island, where Maren always provided them with a supply of food to take with them; they asked each other if either had brought any money with which to buy bread, and it came out that every one had left his pocketbook at home.

Pub¬ lishing in various newspapers and periodicals—most importantly Wil¬ liam Randolph Hearst’s Examiner—he earned a reputation as a scathing satirist and fearless social critic.

For example, in 1899 a dapper young New Yorker named Roland Molineux was accused ofsending cya¬ nide-laced patent medicine to two fellow members of his exclusive Man¬ hattan athletic club.

An interesting sidebar to the story concerns two policies that Nightmare on Elm Drive • 755 were thought to have been taken out on Menendez by Live Entertain¬ ment.

Once she even committed the unpardonable social sin of turning up at a formal dance accompanied by boys wearing what was described as beatnik dress.

“He had an expression oftotal despair. It was an extraordinary shot—so evocative of the despair of that region.”

“Why—its Curry!” he exclaimed.

Though a signatory of the Mayflower Compact—and thus a part ofthe hallowed band known as the Pilgrim Fathers—he was regarded by fellow-passengers as a mu¬ tinous “miscreant” and “one of the profanest men among us.”

In replacing the usual anonymous reporters with journalistic headliners, Hearst—along with his nemesis, Pulitzer, who assigned his own heavyhitters to the story—planted a seed that would come to full flower during the 1920s and 30s, when celebrity authors such as Damon Runyon, Theo¬ dore Dreiser, and Edna Ferber covered high-profile stories like the HallMills double murder, the Robert Edwards “American Tragedy” case, and the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.

Henry Judd was inclined to be verbose while Wallace tried to keep him pinned down to yes and no.

The horror rendered my mother’s death both more outre and more prosaic.

Circumstantial evidence, notwithstanding, clearly pointed to Mur¬ phy as the criminal, and to Meyers as his accomplice; the former being sentenced to death, and the latter, being convicted of manslaughter, to a term oftwo years in the State Penitentiary.

Lana Turner was on her way to stardom, even though she recoiled in embarrassment when she first viewed herself in the film, crying: “I look so cheapT (This was not 670 • Jay Robert Nash actually her first motion picure appearance; she had been a crowd ex¬ tra in A Star Is Born, released earlier that year.) Later, the woman who would be among the ten top female film stars in the nation would look back upon her first solo appearance and remark: “I was one of those photogenic accidents.

I looked into one of the front rooms; as usual it was piled with the accumulated junk and worn out bric-a-brac of thirty years.

There was no other circumstance in the case, let alone an extenuating one.

But she had neither the desire nor the time to become further involved, devoting all her free hours and earnings to the dancing school she attended every day, learning ballet and adagio, tap-dancing, the rumba, and the tango.

The defense asked ifthey were planning to take pictures ofthe Bluegrass as well as Appalachia.

A former servant girl, born Dorcas Doyen, from Augusta, Maine, Jew¬ ett was killed with an axe in a stylish Manhattan brothel in the spring of 1836.

Works such as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner's Song, Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, and Joe McGinnis’s Fatal Vision not only appealed to broad mainstream audi¬ ences but garnered often dazzling reviews, even as they fueled an increas¬ ingly heated controversy over the blurring of fact and fiction.

A few years later, an attack of encephalitis left Chessman tone deaf.

.... sank to the stratum from which his victims emanated. He may have been a doctor, a medical student, at some time in the past; a prosector butcher, osteopath, chiropractor, orderly, nurse, or hunter. . . . It appears that he gains the confidence and probably the friendship of his victims before killing them. . . . The murderer...

...by which, at the same time, he gratified his vengeful instincts; that he prepared the crime carefully so that it would appear to be the work of a political hothead to whom those borne to triumph by his act would then be indebted, and not the work of a religious fanatic, because ifthat were what he was, he would...

He wrote, “Were these deaths due to sexual perversion (sadism) there would have been multiple body laceration and other mutilation as de¬ scribed by Dr. H. S. Martland ... in considering the Whitechapel murders in London.”

566 • Miriam Allen deFord When darkness came at last, the two killers drove to 118th Street and the Panhandle tracks, where a concrete culvert, or drain pipe, opened from a swamp not far from the highway.

Any particularly notorious killing was likely to be written up in doggerel or prose and printed on broad¬ sheets or in cheaply made pamphlets to be sold by itinerant peddlers.

The foreman delivered the verdict to the bailiff, who handed it to the clerk.

Independence who bayoneted a ship¬ mate after an exchange of words; the Harpes, a notorious pair of fron¬ tier robbers and murderers; Joel Clough, hanged for stabbing a widow who did not return his affections; and Jesse Strang, the besotted young man described below, who, at the instigation of his married paramour Elsie Whipple, shot and killed her elderly husband—an antebellum pre¬ cursor ofthe notorious Snyder-Gray case ofthe 1920s.

Any particularly notorious killing was likely to be written up in doggerel or prose and printed on broad¬ sheets or in cheaply made pamphlets to be sold by itinerant peddlers.

It focuses on some ofthe most notorious criminal cases in American history: the Helen Jewett murder, the as¬ sassination ofPresident Garfield, the Snyder-Gray mur¬ der (the inspiration for Double Indemnity), Leopold and Loeb, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahlia, the Manson family, the “Son ofSam.”

The gigolo swam in Lana’s king-size pool and lounged next to a cabana the size of a small apartment house, where hot and cold showers and sunray rooms and massage rooms were made available to Johnny and guests.

In the view ofthe French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the criminal contributes to civic well-being not only by promoting a sense of solidarity among law-abiding citizens, united in condemnation of the malefactor, but by providing a cathartic outlet for their primal vengeful impulses.

Very Remarkable had been the Warnings, which this Hell-Hound, had Received from Heaven, to Repent of his Impieties.

They made derogatory remarks about her hat.

The story is told of a woman who went to New Brighton in Great Jones street, under the protection of a Headquarters detective, for the express purpose of seeing Paul Kelly, who had been mentioned in the newspapers in connection with some particularly sensational gang affray.

Dragel contacted Commander Flanagan who was out on the street, directing the manhunt.

Of his prodigious output, a few works have earned him an enduring place in our literary history: his magnum opus, Magnalia Christi Americana; or The Ecclesiastical History of New-England (1702); Bonifacius, an Essay Upon the Good (1710), his most popular work and a particular favorite of Benjamin Franklins; Wonders...

Every bit of minutiae was mortar with which to build walls to block out Geneva Hilliker Ellroy.

...A THEORY OF HIS OWN Thinks the Victim Was Attacked and Killed in a Fight After a Hard Struggle The text of the lead, set in bold type, was exclamatory and consecrated to the obvious.

) He arrested a voodoo doctor.

His services are highpriced and valuable; his laugh is chilling, his perspicacity great, and his 160 • Jose Marti conduct in the courtroom puerile and reprehensible.

In the days of the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, and later when Dandy Johnny Dolan ofthe Whyos was the fashion plate of gangland, the gangster was a big man; but in the course of years the misery and congestion of tenement life took their toll, and police and prison records show that the average gang member of the time of the Gophers, the Eastmans and the Five Pointers was not more than five feet and three inches tall, and weighed between 120 and 135 pounds.

Gumbert gave himself up to the officers ofjustice, and was shortly after discharged by Justice Atwill, on his own recognizance, to appear for trial at six o’clock in the evening.

In the view ofthe French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the criminal contributes to civic well-being not only by promoting a sense of solidarity among law-abiding citizens, united in condemnation of the malefactor, but by providing a cathartic outlet for their primal vengeful impulses.

In a bleary, addicted daze I followed the last years in the life of Caryl Chessman and, with increasing interest—or con¬ sumption, perhaps one should call the taking in of the flesh and blood of a person through the daily press—his last months.

For one brief moment, at least, Henry Judd Gray, most of the days of his life a dull, drab sort of a fellow, busied with a corset clientele, attained the proportions of a dramatic figure.

...my father, who followed God and was not mad. That was why I said, when I took out a life insurance policy, that there had been no cases of dementia in my family.”

Among those who heard the news was Noel Nedli, a tennis-team friend from Beverly Hills High who was Erik Menendez’s roommate in a condominium that Erik was leasing for six months at the Marina City Club Towers, next to the condominium that his brother had leased with his girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik.

Dunne’s powerful account of Sweeney’s trial—which resulted in his receiving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for manslaughter—was published in Vanity Fair and launched his career as a crime journalist, specializing in corruption and murder among (in his phrase) “the upper echelons.”

Quincy Whig, April 15, 1846 AMBROSE BIERCE Apart from his hardscrabble upbringing as one of 13 children born to poor midwestern farmers, the Civil War was undoubtedly the single most determining influence on the outlook of Ambrose Bierce (1842- 1914?).

“Possibly it was a case of jealousy,” wrote Charles Nuetzel in Whodunit?

O Lord our Good God; thou art a Merciful God, and a Gracious and Loving Lather; Alas, that thou shouldest Nourish up Children that have Rebelled against Theel O Lord, I must confess, thou gavest me opportunity to read thy Written Word; Thou art also my Creator and Preserver; but, Lord, I have not done ac¬ cording to the Offers ofthy Grace; thou hast not hid from me the opportunities ofthe Good Things & Liberties of thy House and Ordinances; but I have waxed wanton under the Enjoyment of them.

It is not farfetched to imagine that splatterings of blood and guts found their way onto the clothes and shoes of the killers, which would have necessitated a change of clothing and pos¬ sibly a shower.

It is glass and chrome and well-weathered stucco; it is also gimcrack, ersatz and urban sprawl at its worst.

“Leaning against a lamp, on a kind of a knickknack stand, there was a studio photograph of a big blond guy with little turned-up mustaches under his nose—a kind of Dutch version of a sport,” Mr. Brown recalls.

This article, from the January 23,1897, number, describes a dockside stakeout by a team of Australian and American lawmen awaiting the arrival of a ship carrying a fugitive multiple murderer and reflects Nor¬ ris’s keen interest in crime, an interest that would bear literary fruit in his naturalistic masterpiece McTeague, published the year after he left The Wave and partly based on a sensational real-life case of domestic murder.

Alice told Piering that it was not her fault; she had thought she was aboard only for a bon voyage party but the men had playfully locked her and a girlfriend in a wash¬ room and carried them off to sea.

That the future author of The Octopus, a devastating depiction ofthe stranglehold ofrailroad companies on western farmers, should serve his literary apprenticeship on this particular periodical is not without irony, since The Wave was started by a publicist for the Southern Pacific Rail¬ road to promote travel to Monterey.

In the view ofthe French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the criminal contributes to civic well-being not only by promoting a sense of solidarity among law-abiding citizens, united in condemnation of the malefactor, but by providing a cathartic outlet for their primal vengeful impulses.

“Its case is built on suspicion and circumstantial evidence so weak it is afflicted with pernicious anemia. Robert’s amateurish way of thinking drove him to blackjack the girl to make it look like an accident. He was bewildered, he was confused. If he committed this crime, this boy is the dumbest criminal agency I ever observed. How can you say all these preparations —these dumbbell preparations—were part of a plan to kill this girl? “You can’t,” the defense attorney concluded.

...of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinis¬ ter monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the ter¬ rible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouse of...

A minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant ofhigh character and known probity; a mining superintendent ofintel¬ ligence and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing, were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside.

Five months of hearings and deliberations to see whether the audiotapes of Dr. Jerome Oziel were admissible in the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez.

Mencken’s satirical use of honorific titles (“Baby Face Nelson LL.D.,”

Tru¬ man Capote’s claim that his book represented a radically new literary genre, the “nonfiction novel,” was widely dismissed from the moment he made it, with critics quickly pointing to Meyer Levin’s 1956 best seller Compulsion.

A Reprieve would have been obtained for him, if his foolish and froward Refusing to hear a Sermon on the Day appointed for his Ex¬ ecution, had not hardened the Hearts of the Judges against him.

In case they are not so quoted, I will say to you in their entirety they are nothing more than the excited, emotional, erratic blather of a boy of twenty-one, bewitched by the physical and emotional charms of the girl of his choice.

Charlie Manson’s Home on the Range The horse wrangler, tall and ruggedly handsome, placed his hands on the hips of a pretty girl wearing white bell-bottomed trousers and casually lifted her onto a hitching post near the stable;...

More wrong turns in marriage were made with actor Lex Barker, Fred May, and Robert Eaton; her seventh marriage was to Ronald Dante.

But in the early 1930s this was a region of Italian and Greek vendettas, of speakeasies and secret distilleries, of narcotics dens and houses of prostitution; and more than one man went to the electric chair from the Roaring Third.

Fol¬ lowing its initial recitation, either at church or on the scaffold itself, such sermons might be printed and sold as pamphlets and sometimes later collected in book form.

This Mr. Beever is the gentleman who, the other day, went to call upon his wife, from whom he had been some time separated, and before leaving took occasion to inveigle her into a back kitchen by the chignon, and then threw off the disguise and revealed himself in his true colors with a sharp hatchet.

The first popular form such accounts took was the Puritan execu¬ tion sermon, a genre with roots in the Old World that flourished so ex¬ traordinarily here that it can fairly be claimed as indigenous.

171 The Murder of Annie Downey, Alias “Curly Tom” As a flower girl Annie Downey started out in life, and the acquain¬ tances which she formed while peddling bouquets along the Bowery doubtless led to her ruin.

Judge Valentine rapped his gavel twice, and court was adjourned for the day.

Nevertheless, this Diabolical Creature, had Lived in most infandous Buggeries for no less than Fifty years together; and now at the Gallows, there were Pillars of Salt • 7 killed before his Eyes, a Cow, Two Heifers, Three Sheep, and Two Sowes, with all of which he had Committed his Brutalities.

As to the propriety of his coming- home, Capt. Dyer thought it might be well to give him a trial on probation, “give him a chance to redeem himself.”

Young Love Unrequited love can be as painful as an abscessed tooth.

If you prepare her for sepulture by the slower process of methodical poisoning, that is man¬ slaughter, too.

Scattered about the chamber were machetes, a Roy Rogers pistol, ash trays made of German shells, clips of 30-30 cartridges for rifle use and a host of varied war souvenirs.

At first he seemed to have a certain air of bravado, perhaps a rem¬ nant of the same curious spirit that may have sent him into the mur¬ der in the first place—the desire of a weakling fellow to show off, you might say.

But here is where the tragedy lies: this felt need is compulsive and negative only.

Pretending to have 58 • The Record ofCrimes in the United States business elsewhere, Strang left the house, saying he should be gone two days, and met Mrs. Whipple at a place of assignation.

A pyjama-top, knotted into two ligatures, was loosely tied around her bruised neck.

For one brief moment, at least, Henry Judd Gray, most of the days of his life a dull, drab sort of a fellow, busied with a corset clientele, attained the proportions of a dramatic figure.

It is needless to say that Mr. Levy, who managed to suggest that he was just a shabby neighbor of the jurors, seeking to rescue a fluttering butterfly from the juggernaut of the State, made the most of that “Caesar, Caesar, why did you do this?”

...near by, as a sentinel, to give warning of the approach of any intruder; that William and Archibald then removed the buggy to the edge of a dense brush thicket, about forty yards distant from his (Henry’s) position, where, leaving the buggy, they entered the thicket, and in a few minutes returned with the body and placed it in...

...affluent 39 40 • Anonymous circumstances, he maintained his family (which consisted of a wife and four children,) very comfortably.—From the natural gentleness of his disposition, his industry, sobriety, probity and kindness, his neighbours universally esteemed him, and until the fatal night when he perpetrated the cruel act, none saw cause of blame in him.

To his last moment he expected his lawyer to save him with some sort of preposterous writ or other, or his colleagues to break into the jail and deliver him by force.

But in the enraged silence the slattern took backwater fast.

Lyle decided to go into the restaurant business, and paid a reported $550,000 for a cafeteria-style eatery in Princeton, which he renamed Mr. Buffalo’s, flying back and forth coast to coast on MGM Grand Air.

Good Scoville has called on a retinue of favorable witnesses: the sister of the accused has on his behalf told the story of his downfalls, extravagances, and miseries; his brother, who once believed he was guilty, has come to prove, in his honorable and forthright testimony, that he no longer believes him to be master of himself, but mentally deranged.

The perpetrator was 23- year-old Robert Allen Edwards, who drowned his pregnant girlfriend, Freda McKechnie, in a Pennsylvania lake so that he could be free to marry Margaret Crain, a young music teacher with whom he was con¬ ducting a torrid affair.

On Monday, December 17, John Stickney put in a full eight hours on his job, blasting rock out of a quarry with dynamite.

He wore a fedora hat and an overcoat.

He says that since he told his story to the world from the witness stand he has found tranquility, though his tale may have also condemned his blond part¬ ner in blood.

All about the house he searches, in bureau drawers, in trunks and boxes: he finds fifteen dollars for his night’s work!

A little earlier Andrassy had told a friend that he was begging, that he had been drinking heavily, that he intended to quit, that while panhandling in Detroit he had knocked down a China¬ man and been obliged to leave town.

Gray stepped to the stand with a quick tread, and an almost sol¬ dierly bearing, which was most surprising in view of the fact he has looked all folded-up like an old accordion since the trial started.

On Friday, August 3, Robert Allen Edwards was charged with the murder of Freda McKechnie and remanded to the Luzerne County Jail.

And Duker and the Norris murderers also ran more true to normalcy, for all of them save Dr. Allers, who succumbed to the stiletto of a col¬ league, are still alive, fat and full of hope, with the taxpayers of Mary¬ land providing them with free board and lodging, and the procession of the seasons ripening them for their inevitable parole.

She has been cold, calm, contemptuous, gutsy, angry, but never shrinking, save perhaps in that little walk to and from the court between the recesses.

The room was elegantly fur¬ nished with mirrors, splendid paintings, sofas, ottomans, and every variety of costly furniture.

A distinct thud was heard and a commotion stirred the men and women packed like sardines in one part of the court.

The Lessons of this Gospel have been both pri¬ vately and publickly set before thee, with a vast variety of Inculcation.

The dinner guest, however, would almost certainly prove to be a large adult male, armed and with a nasty taste for fragmentation.

One ofthem was that he had once started a fire in his back yard and then, putting on a fireman’s helmet, had doused it gleefully with a pail of water.

He could not find her in or near the house; he went down to the empty and dilapidated houses about the cove, and sought her everywhere.

And Duker and the Norris murderers also ran more true to normalcy, for all of them save Dr. Allers, who succumbed to the stiletto of a col¬ league, are still alive, fat and full of hope, with the taxpayers of Mary¬ land providing them with free board and lodging, and the procession of the seasons ripening them for their inevitable parole.

Any particularly notorious killing was likely to be written up in doggerel or prose and printed on broad¬ sheets or in cheaply made pamphlets to be sold by itinerant peddlers.

He was wearing chinos and tennis shoes and a lumberjack shirt.

On Sabbath dayes I us’d to lye at home, or be ill imploy’d elsewhere when I should have been at Church.

She kept her eyes closed while Millard was berating her, supporting her head on her right hand, an elbow leaned on the table.

Sometimes that acknowledgment results in art of a high order; some¬ times merely in news reporting we find impossible to ignore.

And through the thick dark¬ ness booms, hour after hour, the abysmal tones of a giant bell, an¬ nouncing to the victim the incessant approach or the fearful midnight when the walls shall crush his bones to shapelessness.

Without Robert’s incriminating statements, with only his admission to Detective Powell that he had blackjacked Freda after she died accidentally, the state’s case against the defendant was far from airtight.

They were present, as I gathered, to acquire local color for their cur¬ rent, or future contributions to the thespian art, and the hour was a trifle early for them to be abroad in the land.

...brought unto a True Faith in the Blood ofthe Lord Jesus Christ, for the pardon of her Blood guiltiness; and it may be, none Endeavoured it more, than that Reverend man, Old Mr. Wilson, who Wrote several Sheets of pathetical Instructions to her, while She was in Prison. That Renowned Man, Old Mr. Cotton also, did his part in...

(I’d like to 370 • Dorothy Kilgallen have a dollar for every salacious love letter, complete with proposals of marriage, that has passed between young people who never wound up within a mile of an altar!)

While his wife remained in San Francisco Dunning met Mrs. Botkin clandestinely, but Mrs. Dunning took her baby to her father’s home in Dover, Delaware, and thereafter her husband and Mrs. Botkin were constant companions at the races and cafes.

There was a woman in practically every flat, and to each Ned presented a cake of soap and delivered a little spiel.

Given the flamboyantly theatrical personality he cultivated through¬ out his career, it seems natural that Alexander Woollcott (1887-1943)— actor, drama critic, writer for The New Yorker, leading Algonquin wit, literary arbiter for the American book-buying public—would be drawn to a character as histrionic as Nan Peterson.

In fact, it was rumored during the afternoon that Gray’s counsel intended asking the court to bar the ladies from the court room, a canard that had several hundred females prepared to go to law for their rights as listeners.

Presently others were convinced that there were a number of long, narrow depressions, like graves, in the ground which old Bender had always kept freshly ploughed and harrowed.

” Thus admonished, Ned hit out straight for his favorite district, the Tenderloin—first, because the biggest establishments were there, and, second, because he thought the rubbers in that area were more worldly types, and so more likely to get in trouble, than their confreres else¬ where.

As the founder of Americas first unabashedly sensationalistic news¬ paper, the New York Herald, Bennett was a seminal figure in the history of true-crime journalism.

Samuel Willis, a tall, spare, elderly resident of Queens Village, told ofseeing Henry Judd Gray waiting for a bus at 5:50 on the morning of March 20, hard by a police booth at Hillside Avenue and Springfield Boulevard, in Queens Village.

But perhaps there is a category ofmass murderers who are neither greedy men nor mad ones, but simply men with a rationale of murder for it own sake.

During summer visits to her grandparents in Stanton, Michigan, she got a closeup look at small-town police work and spent time around the county jail, helping her grandmother serve meals to inmates.

The victim was young and strong, a warm-blooded, passion¬ ate boy, with just that coarse animal vitality which makes men cling most strongly to life, as a thing to be enjoyed in the mere fact of possession—the mere ability to hear, see, feel.

But the confessions do not jibe here.

For three weeks railroad detectives had noticed an Italian sitting in a green coupe atop Jackass Hill, study¬ ing the terrain through binoculars; the police found him but could not connect him with the crime.

...path of evil over the path of good. In Boston, he came to pick a quarrel with me because he’d been told I was spreading infor¬ mation that was prejudicial to him and accusing him of not paying his debts, and in Boston I told him what I’ve just said. And when we were talking about how he did...

Darrow’s experts in¬ cluded an endrocrinologist, and it was easy for him to show how much both ofthe defendants, and Leopold especially, were suffering from ab¬ normalities of the endocrine glands.

Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice.

On one occasion, he and his cohorts captured a Dutch ship and slaughtered all its passengers and crew, except for a 17-year-old girl who, as Gibbs later recounted, “was kept on board for some time” before being killed.

“From what I can learn from the condition of the body, I should say that this is what occurred,” the World quoted Dr. O’Hanlon as extrapolating.

There Butler shot him in the back of the head and buried the body in such a way that a stream of trickling water would help in its decomposition.

...testimony to confuse the issue that is now being tried in this case, and it is clearly shown that such a question is seeking testimony that is improper and inadmissible in this trial.”

The Evi¬ dence against them was numerous, and in many Particulars positive; but the Opinion of the Physician who had visited the Child, that whatever Usage might be given her, the Distemper she laboured under was such, as would of itself in all Probability have ended her Life about the Time she died, it is thought weighed so much with the Jury, that they brought in their Verdict onlyManslaughter.

Here he added perjury to the list of his crimes, and gave a plausible account ofthe matter.

...have always portrayed the gang¬ ster as a low, coarse person with an evilly glinting eye, a chin 303 304 • Herbert Asbury adorned with a rank stubble of unkempt beard, a plaid cap drawn down over beetling brows, and a swagger which in itself was sufficient to inform the world that here was a man bent on devilment....

Typical ofhis methods was the famous “Dead Line” he estab¬ lished to cordon offthe financial district: any known criminal who ven¬ tured south of Fulton Street was arrested on sight and summarily shipped offto Blackwell’s Island.

A not astonishing distaste, you must admit.

They got Leopold’s spyglasses, continued hunting for Johnnie, located him, and started to follow him home, but he went up an alley and disappeared.

The bailiffs would bawl “Silence!” and glare around furiously.

He had heavily veined, sagging jowls, and a short, bull neck, plentifully scarred with battle marks, as were his cheeks.

There is a small waiting room outside the office, with a table for maga- Nightmare on Elm Drive • 761 zines and several places to sit, but there is no receptionist.

He must have gone, after that, directly down to the river, that beautiful, broad river, the Piscataqua, upon whose southern bank the quaint old city of Ports¬ mouth dreams its quiet days away; and there he found a boat ready to his hand, a dory belonging to a man by the name of David Burke, who had that day furnished it with new thole-pins.

A lonely cairn, erected by some long ago forgotten fishermen or sailors, stands upon the highest rock at the southeastern extremity; at its western end a few houses are scattered, small, rude dwellings, with the square old Haley house near; two or three fish-houses are falling into decay about the water-side, and the ancient wharf drops stone by stone into the little cove, where every day the tide ebbs and flows and ebbs again with pleasant sound and freshness.

A beat patrolman reported learning that only two weeks before her death Flo Polillo had been living with an Italian of this unsavory de¬ scription: “35-40 years, 5 ft-9-10-150 very dark comp and bushy hair large flat nose, heavy black eye brows, ugly looking. Generally poorly dressed . . . on Relief. . . . Hangs out in a bootleg joint. . . . Also is known in a butcher shop.”

There were giggling young schoolgirls and staid-looking matrons, and my friends, what do you think?

...ward of our city in one of our most populous and frequented streets in broad daylight. That the author of this revolting crime when young was convicted of a heinous offense; but his sen¬ tence was “commuted,” which if executed might have arrested him in his downward career and saved to our city a valuable and precious life.

...So this Bewitched Beast, that had not been afraid of Dying, till he came to the Place of Execution, when he came There, he was Awakened into a most Unutterable and Intolerable Anguish of Soul, and made most Lamentably Desperate Out cries; Among which Out cries, he warned men, particularly, to Take heed ofNeglecting Se¬ cret Prayer; which he...

There were three doors leading into the room, one from the hall, one from the adjoining hall bedroom, and the third from the rear room.

...he once had borrowed a butcher knife; he once had thrown a knife at a woman; he 456 • John Bartlow Martin once had worked three months in a slaughterhouse; he had a note¬ book containing some twenty-five names, including that of a sailor living in California; gossip said Dolezal entertained homosexuals.

He worked as a newspaper reporter for eight years before joining the staff of The New Yorker, where he became a revered figure among his journalistic peers for his spare, ele¬ gantly crafted essays on characters such as Cockeye Johnny, self-declared “King of the Gypsies,” Arthur Samuel Colborne, one-man crusader against barroom profanity, and Joe Gould, master ofsea-gull language and author of the (nonexistent) nine-million-word “Oral History of Our Times.”

In his summation, Smith saved his harshest words not for the de¬ fendant but for the person who was responsible for bringing Hobart Ison, a mountaineer who was not quite typical of mountaineers, and Hugh O’Connor, a stranger with a camera who was not quite typical of strangers with cameras, into violent conflict.

He nevertheless en¬ joyed the eminence of a putative master criminal for at least one day.

And when thou goest to Thievery, thy wickedness is discovered, and thou art found Guilty.

The 1841 ax-murder of New York City printer Samuel Adams by John C. Colt (brother of the gun-maker) also made a lasting impression on Melville, who 12 years later in “Bartleby the Scrivener” accentuated the grim impersonality of the urban office by re¬ calling that it was in “a solitary office . . . entirely unhallowed by hu¬ manizing domestic associations” that “the hapless Colt” had been driven to kill “the unfortunate Adams.”

Nearly half of its Wednesday front page was given over to an idealized sketch of Mrs. Nack’s head, which made her look rather like Pallas Athena.

Also she desired a manicure, but the cruel authorities would not permit the selected one to attend the lady.

To attempt a portrayal of that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be like portraying Mormondom and leaving out polygamy.

They expressed their admiration for the great bouncer by their slovenly appearance, their clipped, slangy speech, and a willingness to fight anybody, any time, and anywhere.

The fact of his having carried the hatchet with him, is substantiated, by there being a piece of twine attached to his button hole, which tallied precisely with a piece attached to the handle of the hatchet.

And today, as Mr. Flannery began to read them, I thought I would hear just how irredeemable this defendant is.

The judge agreed to listen to evidence in mitigation of the crime.

...ofSalt. This compilation of a dozen accounts (half ofwhich, including the case of Morgan, had been previously published) stands as a landmark work, a Puritan precursor of the true-crime miscellanies that, stripped of all religious intent, would become a staple ofthe genre in subsequent centuries. 3 4 • Cotton Mather Pillars of Salt t hath been Thought, that the...

The following piece, the penulti¬ mate in Dreiser’s reports for the Post, sets forth his view that the killer was ultimately less to blame for the crime than the societal and sexual forces that drove him.

Lincoln’s wide experience as a litigator stood him in good stead in his dealings with Trailor when the latter reneged on his $100 legal fee.

They went into the desert and discovered—precisely as Bruns had described them —the grisly, skeletal remains of Gretchen and Wendy Fritz.

The moral gamut that runs from the wild beast to man has its degrees, like the zoological gamut.

The girl was remarkably perceptive and was able to describe the killer’s features as Rathel made quick strokes with his pencil.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/truecrimeamericaOOharo TRUE CRIME

A year earlier, on September 5, 1934, a man picking up driftwood on the Lake Erie shore near Euclid Beach, an amusement park some eight miles east of downtown Cleveland, had found a piece of a womans naked body partly buried in the sand.

He at first stood with his hands behind him, but presently he was gesticulating with his right, waggling a prehensile index-finger most forcibly.

His skin was reddish-yellow and tough, and a laboratory technician thought “some unknown chemical had been applied,” perhaps as a preservative.

About the end of August, Strang went to live with Mr. Van Rens¬ selaer, who dwelt in a house in which Mr. Whipple and his wife were boarders.

After his arrest, he had whiled away the time in his cell reading books on metallurgy.

In seventeen minutes Dr. Crum, after a stethoscope examination, made the official announcement of death.

In a short time Mrs. Townsend was aroused by the smell ofsmoke— she rushed up stairs and saw the bed on fire and the mangled body of the unfortunate girl upon it.

Murder by a near-genius, whose act can be traced not to any demonstrable insanity, but to a 557 558 • Miriam Allen deFord profound physical and emotional abnormality, is rarer still.

Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992)—books whose violence and ferocity justified his self-proclaimed status as the “Demon Dog of American literature.”

No punishment that could be imagined could hurt her more than the memory of this nightmarish event.

They were all watching the man on the wit¬ ness stand, up to this moment more like a baggy dummy, popping out, through a mechanical mouth, words thrown in by the ventriloquists voice.

Nightmare on Elm Drive On a recent New York-to-Los Angeles trip on MGM Grand Air, the most luxurious of all coast-to-coast flights, I was chilled to the bone marrow during a brief encounter with a fellow passenger, a boy ofperhaps fourteen, or fifteen, or maybe even sixteen, who lounged restlessly in a sprawled-out fashion, arms and legs akimbo, avidly reading racing-car magazines, chewing gum, and beating time to the music on his Walkman.

It was a child’s coda to horror: A woman dies fending off violation.

At first he seemed to have a certain air of bravado, perhaps a rem¬ nant of the same curious spirit that may have sent him into the mur¬ der in the first place—the desire of a weakling fellow to show off, you might say.

Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Griffith both testified, and disclosed some incidents in careers which were checkered with matrimonial and extramatrimonial adven¬ tures and not free from collisions with the law.

On his body were six tattoos, as follows: left shoulder, a butterfly; calf ofleft leg, the cartoon figure “Jiggs”; left arm, the initials “W.C.G.,” an arrow through a heart, and a standard of flags; right calf, a cupid superimposed upon an anchor; right arm, a dove below “HelenPaul.”

The desperado stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make a humble admirer happy for the rest of the day.

My disillusionment was complete.

They got a look in return that froze their marrow, and by that time a curled and breast-pinned bar keeper was beaming over the counter, proud ofthe established acquaintance¬ ship that permitted such a familiar form ofspeech as: “How’re ye, Billy, old fel? Glad to see you. What’ll you take—the old thing?”

Rather prosaic per¬ sons become ecstatic in thinking about him; soon they have him 217 218 • Edmund Pearson enlarged to the proportions of a monster of heroic size; a werewolf; something with which to scare generations of children.

The cobbler, a 27-year-old man who lives in Pennsauken Township, looked up open-mouthed as Unruh came to within a yard of him.

God then gave her a Space to Repent, and she repented not: She Repeted her Whoredomes, and by an Infatuation from God upon her, She so managed the matter of her next Base Born, that she is found Guilty ofits Murder: Thus the God, whose Eyes are like a Flame of Fire, is now casting her into a Bed of Burning Tribulation: And, ah, Lord, Where wilt thou cast those that have committed Adultery with her, Ex¬ cept they Repent!

Any particularly notorious killing was likely to be written up in doggerel or prose and printed on broad¬ sheets or in cheaply made pamphlets to be sold by itinerant peddlers.

The judge, facing the obviously woebegone and smitten young man, told Bruns that he wouldn’t be jailed if he’d agree to get out of town until he got over his infatuation.

(Captain Van Buren suggests all were migratory workers.)

How do you account for that— But while Henry Judd’s confession puts most of the blame on the woman, Mrs. Snyder’s attorneys, the pugnacious Edgar Hazelton and the sharp Dana Wallace, who remind me for all the world of a brace of restless terriers with their brisk maneuvers, began making an effort yesterday that shows they intend trying to make Henry Judd the goat.

Dr. Mais’ escape was a monument to the sentimentality with which such swine are now treated.

The fact shown most clearly by the painstaking researches of the psychiatrists called by Darrow was that, inherently, Leopold had no criminal bent.

Recently she had been going through a period of adolescent melancholia, often talking with her mother, a nurse, about death.

Public fascination with Manson and his “Family” was reflected in an outpouring ofwriting about every facet ofthe case, including this 1970 Esquire magazine piece by Gay Talese (b.

Arrested and sent to re¬ form school, he was released after less than 17 months and promptly committed a pair of appalling mutilation-murders.

Half a dozen Gophers, wandering out of Hells Kitchen into the East Side in quest of profitable adventure and honorable advance¬ ment, came upon the scene, and stayed not to learn the point at issue or even who was fighting, but unlimbered their artillery and went joy¬ fully into action, firing indiscriminately at both Eastmans and Five Pointers.

Back on Mercer Island, John Stickney’s boss and his fellow workers were “absolutely flabbergasted” when they learned of the tragedy.

Can the human mind conceive of such hideous nonchalance?

...him, given him a hard blow to the head, or jarred his 162 • Jose Marti mind. Then came all the misfortunes: his mad ambitions, his mar¬ riage, his impoverishment, his absurd, audacious enterprises, and his constant mishaps. He came back to my house, where he had lived as a child. His every action was that of a madman:...

According to scholar Cecil Brown, this famous American murder ballad—a favorite ofbluesmen and folksingers who have recorded countless versions, often under the title “Stagolee”—was inspired by the slaying of one William Lyons, shot dead in a St. Louis tavern on Christmas night 1895 by a local pimp named Lee Shelton (aka “Stack Lee”) after the two men got into an altercation involving Shelton’s milk-white Stetson hat.

If anybody shall tweak you by the nose, don’t mellow him with a mallet, mangle him with a meat-ax nor bust him with a bludgeon.

Conveyed in the same tone of breathless wonderment used to report other marvelous occurrences, from the births of two-headed babies to the sightings of sea-serpents, these early crime narratives were, for the most part, crude productions, short on artistic sensibility but full of shocking detail and moralistic fervor.

Increasingly estranged from her husband, she took to spending extended stretches on the Isles.

He was thin to the point of emaciation; but he was six feet, four inches tall, and stood straight like the Indians who had once roamed these rocky hills.

Scores of display windows were broken and looters invaded the stores, carting away nearly everything that wasn’t nailed down.

But the scab of the old sore was scraped off, and it oozed blood afresh.

After her conviction her erstwhile lover, her mother, sister, son, and also her former husband, died within a short time.

It seemed a lot of bother about a sash weight that has lost some of its importance since the doctors testified that the wallops with it alone did not cause Snyder’s death.

Starting in the 1980s, his novels were rediscovered by a new generation of readers who found the hardboiled nihilism of his paperback crime novels irresistible, and many (including The Grifters, Pop.

Lamm, who is an effusive and witty conversationalist, and Kitty spent much ofthe evening talking together.

Anthony Kotowski, another Nickel Plate detective, says, “They lay around in the jungles, drink that smoke, then pass out petrified. It’d be easy for anybody to grab one if he wanted one.”

Although subject to spells of despondency, with the exception of the above act, nothing hap¬ pened of serious notice which exhibited his fiendish cruelty hitherto latent in his bosom, until the following acts became public which we will now narrate.

What they uncovered was a cesspool of erotic, profane, and obscene writings that made The Memoirs ofFanny Hill look like a toned-down version ofLittle Women.

In another, it was something of a tribute to the power of good old publicity.

But he himself, though he took a seat in the wit¬ ness box with jocose tone and friendly smile to testify on his own behalf, arose from it haggard and rattled, as if he could still feel his able prosecutor’s iron hand on his skull.

Bruns by now was wallowing in feelings of sacrifice and nobility— all of it unappreciated by Kathy Morath and her parents.

After service in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, he returned to Colorado, working sporadically in various small-town dailies when he wasn’t on drinking binges or bumming around the Midwest.

An enormously prolific contributor to the mass-circulation magazines of the 1940s and 1950s whose powerful stories on labor racketeering, poor working conditions, crime, the abuse ofmental patients, and other muckraking subjects led, in a number of cases, to major public policy changes, Martin became a political speechwriter, first for Adlai Steven¬ son and then for John Kennedy.

For all their gentle offbeat humor, his tales are rife with violent fantasy, particularly his celebrated stories of “little men” and their domineering mates whose marital warfare sometimes culminates in actual homicide.

New York Post, October 5, 1934 DOROTHY KILGALLEN Though best known to people of a certain age as a panelist on the popu¬ lar 1950s television quiz show “What’s My Line?”—on which participants tried to uncover the offbeat occupations of weekly guests—Dorothy Kilgallen (1913-1965) first gained prominence as a news reporter and columnist.

Flaky, juicy, hot.

Anethe was young, fair, and merry, with thick, bright sunny hair, which was so long it reached, when unbraided, nearly to her knees; blue-eyed, with brilliant teeth and clear, fresh complexion, beautiful, and beloved beyond expression by her young husband, Ivan.

Under that Sentence, there was heard among them, a grievous Lamentation for This; Their Education had been under the means of Grace, and thefaithful Preaching ofthe Gospel in England; but they had Sinned against that Education.

Not much jocularity to Henry Judd Gray now as he shrinks in and out of the court room in Long Island City while the ponderous machinery of the law grinds the sausage of circumstance into links of evidence.

Detectives found the sole Cleve¬ land distributor for Wheel Brand potatoes at the wholesale market at East 40th and Woodland, not far from Kingsbury Run, but he said tracing the bag would be impossible, since he annually received from four to five hundred carloads, each containing about four hundred Butcher’s Dozen • 451 bags which he sold to wholesalers who sold them to retailers who in turn sold the potatoes a few at a time, then discarded the bags.

Herman Melville was likewise fascinated with accounts of real-life murders, particularly the atrocities of the Harpes, two murderous cous¬ ins who terrorized the Tennessee and Kentucky frontier during a killing spree in 1798-99.

The police said he could not have been a sailor, because there were no calluses on his hands.

A pastor, educator, and prominent member of the Connecticut Wits, America’s first poetic “school,” Dwight owes his place in our literary history to three ambitious poems: The Conquest ofCanaan (1785), an epic-length expansion of the biblical story of Joshua; The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), a lengthy defense of orthodox Calvinism; and Greenfield Hill (1794), a pastoral celebration of New England village life.

...to such Hardships, as afterwards produced grievous Sickness and Lameness; during which, instead of supplying her with Necessaries and due Attendance, they treated her with the utmost Cruelty and Barbarity, suffering her to lie and rot in her Nastiness, and when she cried for Bread giving her into her Mouth with a Iron Ladle, her own Excrements to eat,...

Mirroring cultural shifts in the country at large, American true-crime writing in the early republic became increasingly commercialized and di¬ vorced from its religious origins.

During his recuperation he became acquainted with and dated one of the nurses.

Other famous writers of the interwar era, among them James Thurber and Alexander Woollcott, found an outlet for their own fascination with murder in the pages of The New Yorker, which began its recurrent and Introduction • xvii still-active “Annals of Crime” feature during this period.

Hawthorne’s interest in the subject is clear in a fascinating jour¬ nal entry about a visit to a “Hall of Wax Statuary” included in this vol¬ ume, while Melville limited his comments on true crime to a journal en¬ try from November 1849 in which he describes how, on his first trip to London, he paid half a shilling to watch the hanging ofthe married mur¬ derers George and Marie Manning: “The mob was brutish. All in all, a most wonderful, horrible, & unspeakable scene.”

Our country’s answer to the revered Scottish crime historian William Roughead (who numbered Joseph Conrad and Henry James among his admirers), the Harvardeducated Pearson was a professional librarian who wrote widely on vari¬ ous bibliophilic subjects before devoting the last dozen years of his life to the field oftrue crime.

Good Scoville has called on a retinue of favorable witnesses: the sister of the accused has on his behalf told the story of his downfalls, extravagances, and miseries; his brother, who once believed he was guilty, has come to prove, in his honorable and forthright testimony, that he no longer believes him to be master of himself, but mentally deranged.

Concurrently, in another, less fashionable area of the city known as Carthay Circle, an attractive thirty-seven-year-old woman named Judalon Rose Smyth, pronounced Smith, was living out her own drama in a complicated love affair.

From some official descriptions of them, issued by Governor Osborn of Kansas at a time when he was dealing in facts, rather than impressionism, these details are selected: John Bender was about sixty years old, and of medium height.

American readers were inundated with crime stories during the hey¬ day of yellow journalism when, as A. J. Liebling recounts in his piece on a turn-of-the-century dismemberment-murder, newspapermen not only reported on crimes but conducted their own independent investigations.

He was the champion ofthe underdog and he had saved 102 accused murderers from the gallows.

They still were sitting there when Robert Elliott, the State’s thin, bent little executioner, trudged up the steps and entered the barred lobby.

The city, which was inured to gang massacres but not to atrocious murders of children, was in an uproar.

Ad¬ dicted to shiny shirts that he wore open almost to the navel to exhibit his chest, ostentatious, gauche, even crude, he was completely unlike the male stars with whom Lana had acted, and just the opposite of most of her husbands.

Even while insisting that he would never pander to the prurient interests of his readers, Franklin was not above providing them with titillating accounts of sex and violence, a considerable number of which involved domestic cruelty and...

At twenty-one, when 530 • Jack Webb she should have been starting married life or maybe a modest career, she was already obsolescent.

Brown threw off his coat and challenged the man to fight—abused him, threatened him, impeached his cour¬ age, and urged and even implored him to fight; and in the meantime the smiling stranger placed himself under our protection in mock dis¬ tress.

One or two suspicious persons had moved to the other side of the table, so as to face the curtain; and two especially nervous gentlemen, who perhaps heard the sound ofshuffling feet, and of heavy breathing behind the arras, insisted upon eating their meal standing up—which annoyed the Benders almost to the verge of incivility.

After he was grown, Chessman learned that his mother was a foundling.

One was an Oriental who lived in a ruined building near the pool, carried a long-bladed knife, and was described thus: “Stocky, full round face, 438 • John Bartlow Martin black shaggy hair, stooped over, feet turned out, dark coat black shoes greasy cap.”

Police Chief Flarold Tinder wanted to question Speck, but when he went to the hotel, Speck had left suddenly.

Early, he contracted bronchial asthma.

How he conducted the trial was my yardstick.

Other famous writers of the interwar era, among them James Thurber and Alexander Woollcott, found an outlet for their own fascination with murder in the pages of The New Yorker, which began its recurrent and Introduction • xvii still-active “Annals of Crime” feature during this period.

1932), who not only gave the bizarre young se¬ rial murderer nationwide exposure but tagged him with the kind of nickname that endows such psychopaths with a disturbing mystique.

Yet he placed a strong reliance upon dreams, as conveying direct indications ofthe will of God; so strong as to make them the directo¬ ries ofhis own moral conduct in a case oftremendous magnitude.

In the course ofhis 22-month career as assistant editor, Norris contributed approximately 120 pieces ofshort fiction, charactersketches, book reviews, editorials, theater criticism, and sports columns, along with colorful accounts ofthe bustling life ofthe city.

He was impeccably dressed—freshly pressed blue serge suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, and highly polished black shoes.

Another ballad with a readily identifiable author is “Trail’s End,” composed by one of its self-mythologizing subjects, Bonnie Parker, the distaff half of the notorious outlaw couple Bonnie and Clyde.

“I re¬ membered the torso I had looked at that afternoon, with a slab of integument—of whole skin—removed from the chest, apparently to get rid of some distinguishing mark,” Mr. Brown says.

Even while insisting that he would never pander to the prurient interests of his readers, Franklin was not above providing them with titillating accounts of sex and violence, a considerable number of which involved domestic cruelty and murder: a father...

The Horrors, which attended the Chief of these Malefactors (one Forrest) in the last Hours of his Life, were such as Exceedingly aston¬ ished the Beholders.

But what betrayal, even unfaithfulness or a mocking laugh, merited revenge like this?

She mooched at the night spots and the bars where a pretty girl could easily cadge a drink.

Hence the reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being held in indifferent repute by his associates.

Somehow a justice compli¬ cated enough to delay twelve years to study the “technicalities” should have been complicated enough to refuse death simply because so many delays were legally possible.

Throughout these peregrinations, he produced poems, plays, articles, translations, and political essays that made him a revered figure throughout Latin America.

As I gluttonously read a dozen newspapers—a dozen newspapers all telling the same story of the gas pellets, the winks, the final lip-read goodbyes, the last struggles of the body—I remembered a hanging that had taken place in my youth.

Over the next decade, when he wasn’t hobnobbing with socialites and movie stars, Capote worked in a variety of genres, from screenplays and Broadway shows to journalism and fic¬ tion, achieving major success with his 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

While earlier newspaper publishers, including Ben¬ jamin Franklin, recognized the popular appeal of grisly murder stories and offered readers the occasional account of a particularly hideous slaying, no one before Bennett was so attuned to the publics interest in tales of crime and violence.

Walking down Ninth Avenue, after a valedictory beer, Ned had a good look at the building that housed Werner’s drugstore—No. 439.

He lugged us through many a rendezvous in many a different spot with Mrs. Snyder yesterday afternoon, while the lady, who had done a 270 • Damon Runyon little “fingering” herself for three days, sat looking daggers at Henry Judd, and probably thinking arsenic, mercury tablets, chloroform, pic¬ ture wire and sash weights.

...Beast, that had not been afraid of Dying, till he came to the Place of Execution, when he came There, he was Awakened into a most Unutterable and Intolerable Anguish of Soul, and made most Lamentably Desperate Out cries; Among which Out cries, he warned men, particularly, to Take heed ofNeglecting Se¬ cret Prayer; which he said, had been...

A few feet from the chicken-house there was a large splotch of blood-stained sand.

He had horribly slighted all calls to Repentance, and now through some Wretches over-perswading of him, that he should not Dy, ac¬ cording to Sentence & Order ofthe Court, he hardened himselfstill, in his unrepentant frame of mind.

I had imagined that I would be met at the door with all sorts of difficulties, that permits and passes would be demanded and explanations and the like; that the detectives would be austere and distant and preoccupied, preoccupied as men are who are watching for a sign or listening for a signal.

Friendless and impoverished, he struggled to subsist at a variety of menial jobs before becoming a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he quickly earned a reputation for his florid accounts of sensa¬ tional murders.

On the day before the catastrophic event, a Saturday, they chartered a boat called Motion Picture Marine in Marina del Rey and spent the day together shark-fishing, just the four of them.

In the forefront was Lieutenant John Griffith, commander of the homicide and sex crime unit at Area 2 Detective Headquarters at 92nd and Cottage Grove Avenue, only a short distance away.

Nightmare on Elm Drive On a recent New York-to-Los Angeles trip on MGM Grand Air, the most luxurious of all coast-to-coast flights, I was chilled to the bone marrow during a brief encounter with a fellow passenger, a boy ofperhaps fourteen, or fifteen, or maybe even sixteen, who lounged restlessly in a sprawled-out fashion, arms and legs akimbo, avidly reading racing-car magazines, chewing gum, and beating time to the music on his Walkman.

What differs strikingly from era to era, however, is the way such transgressions are interpreted.

One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper correspondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I’d mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald.

Andrassy introduced his friend as “Eddie,” a chauffeur for a wealthy woman in suburban Lakewood whom Andrassy “was doc¬ toring . . . for the same trouble.”

Ah me, what pathos is in that longing look of women’s eyes for far-off sails! that gaze so eager, so steadfast, that it would almost seem as if it must conjure up the ghostly shape of glim¬ mering canvas from the mysterious distances of sea and sky, and draw it unerringly home by the mere force of intense wistfulness!

Arrested and sent to re¬ form school, he was released after less than 17 months and promptly committed a pair of appalling mutilation-murders.

But he himself, though he took a seat in the wit¬ ness box with jocose tone and friendly smile to testify on his own behalf, arose from it haggard and rattled, as if he could still feel his able prosecutor’s iron hand on his skull.

“For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the 549 550 • Robert Bloch nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black...

Wisps of her straw-colored hair strag¬ gled out from under it.

The only common denominator I could find among them was tattoos.

...verily think, thou wert with Child! These passages, which were warnings from God, unto her guilty Soul, did serve only to strike her with Amazement, not with any true Repentance. She concealed her Crime, till the Time of her Delivery; and then, being Delivered alone, by her self in a Dark Room, She Murdered the harmless and helpless Infant;...

...Run and performed his butchery in a “work¬ shop” or “laboratory” there, that he associated with his victims for weeks or months before killing them, that he was not recognizably insane, and that he might well lead a normal life when not engaged in murder.

...black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinis¬ ter monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the ter¬ rible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most...

A World or a Jour¬ nal man finding a useful clue at the scene of a crime would bring it back to his newspaper, in which it would appear as a chalk-plate illus¬ tration over the vainglorious line “Made from a photograph taken in the World [or Journal] office.”

A 371 372 • Edna Ferber mink coat, one ofthose Cossack hats, the word “divine” in your vocab¬ ulary, and there you are, if a woman, equipped complete for a day at Flemington.

It is really a part of the folklore of every nation.

She drank Early Times bourbon and got mawkish or hellaciously pissed off.

Seventy-five cents and a very decent meal—clam chowder, roast beef, boiled potatoes, stewed tomatoes, cole slaw, apple pie and coffee—with all the visiting celebrities thrown in.

Since the neck showed no muscle retraction, de¬ capitation had not caused death, as in most ofthese cases; yet no other cause could be assigned; perhaps the secret was with the missing head.

...and reasonable infer¬ ences from circumstances proven, which the guarded judgment of a reasonable man would ordinarily make under like circumstances; and those just and reason¬ able inferences and deductions which you, as reasonable men, would ordinarily draw from facts and circumstances proven in the case you should draw and act on as jurors; and if, on a consideration...

Kotowski reads it, demented verbiage that rambles through the vocabularies of astron¬ omy and philosophy, nuclear physics and surgery.

He seemed always to need a hair cut, and he accentuated his ferocious and unusual appearance by affecting a derby hat several sizes too small, which perched precariously atop his shock of bristly, unruly hair.

A favorite subject, then as now, was lust-murder, often described in such explicit detail that, according to one contemporary critic, young men could learn more about female anatomy from these tawdry publications than from medical text¬ books.

He was widely read in literature and philosophy—Friedrich Nietzsche and his theory of the Superman became his guiding principle; he was an inspired amateur ornithologist and botanist whose work was taken seriously by profes- Superman’s Crime: Loeb and Leopold • 559 sionals; he spoke nine languages fluently.

But it is not a collage.

In this connection it would of course be in order, religiously, to discourse upon the results of neglecting early admo¬ nitions; and, philosophically, upon the evidence that the unfortunate lad had inherited an evil disposition, whereof the tendencies were not to be counteracted by any number of admonitions.

On the 18th ofMarch, nearly a month before the murder ofthe Millen boy, her mother sent her to a neighboring store on an errand, and she never returned.

He said that Gray at no time seemed to become serious until they told him they had the contents of his wastepaper basket, which included the Pullman stub. “cDo you know, Judd, we have the Pullman ticket you used from Syracuse to New York?’

“Yes,” he chortled, boyishly, as if amused by his slip.

It is impossible to say: the movement of flotsam in a shallow lake like Erie depends almost entirely upon wind and wave action, which is capricious.

There are first seven, then six, then five, then four, then three, then two, then but one—dim and shadowy;—and then the night-black darkness that prefigures the formless gloom of the Shadow of Death.

A milestone in American true-crime writing appeared 25 years after Poe’s death, when Atlantic Monthly published “A Memorable Murder” by the New England writer Celia Thaxter.

Dr. Nelson A. Conroy, of Bellevue, still another medico out to vindicate Dr. Watson, had given the Journal a personal statement, in which he declared irrefutably: “It is hard to say just what the man’s face looked like.”

The scene cannot be otherwise than dramatic—melodramatic even.

But other cuts were “cruder than those in the previous torso cases”; in cutting off the right arm, he had to do “considerably more hacking” than usual; in sectioning the torso he fractured the back irregularly, perhaps tearing it asunder when it proved stubborn, and he badly lac¬ erated the diaphragm and part of one lung.

He was arraigned before a magistrate next morning and promptly dis¬ charged.

To one side, where they have been from the beginning, are the jurors who are for¬ bidden to have any contact with anything unrelated to the trial: they are mute as oracles, and later they will break into oracular speech.

He wore a dark, double-breasted suit of clothes with a white linen collar and a tie that had an almost indecorous stripe.

I hope I am sorry for all my sins, but I must especially bewail my neglect of the means of Grace.

When we came together Dawson sort of turned around, and I struck him with both fists in the breast; Petty struck Meyers, and Meyers caught hold of a post and prevented himself from falling into the gutter, and then straightened himself up and ran away east¬ ward, and Petty started across the street as soon as Meyers ran.

...my present essay, belonged to one of the most respectable families in this state; he resided a few miles from Tomhanick, and though he was not in the most affluent 39 40 • Anonymous circumstances, he maintained his family (which consisted of a wife and four children,) very comfortably.—From the natural gentleness of his disposition, his industry, sobriety, probity...

The plan for killing Snyder, presumably.

Dizzy-looking dolls said to represent the social strata of Park Ave¬ nue—the upper crust, as I understand—were there, not a little proud of their heroism in getting out so early.

Black is a short, plump man in a rumpled blue suit, with a bald spot on top of his head so perfectly round that it might be the tonsure of a monk.

But the Herald called me a swindler, and ruined all of it for me.

“For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the 549 550 • Robert Bloch nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones...

In 1981, he published the noir thriller Browns Requiem, set in a seedy L.A. landscape Ellroy knew firsthand.

Merylo found a fraternity pin under the East 55th Street Bridge over Kings¬ bury Run and traced it to its owner, who had gone there on an inno¬ cent mission.

Roughing It, 1872 ANONYMOUS By the mid-19th century American crime pamphlets had jettisoned the religious and moral didacticism of an earlier era and evolved into an unabashedly sensationalistic form of popular entertainment.

For what greater punishment could be dealt this man than that of seeing all his calculations go up in smoke, and his misery revealed, and his desires unfulfillable, and his final effort frustrated, and his decaying mind revealed to itself, and all the advantages that he hoped to gain by his act irrevocably gone?

It was the deed of two young boys, acting together; and in view of all the evidence it can be said categorically that the crime would never have been committed by either of them acting independently; it was the combination of their peculiar personalities and their reaction on each other that brought it about.

Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, were quickly consigned to a format that made his Butcher’s Dozen and Other Murders indistinguishable from any other exercise in sensationalism sold at bus stations and corner drugstores.

Apparently convinced that an obscure speech he delivered in sup¬ port of Republican presidential candidate James Garfield had been instrumental in Garfield’s election in 1880, he bombarded the new administration with increasingly strident requests for a diplomatic appointment.

What remains the same is the sense that the most flagrant and disturbing crimes elicit from society a compulsion to find some meaning in acts that often seem meaningless.

Over the next six years, a string ofwell-to-do bach¬ elors were lured to her home by matrimonial ads placed in various midwestern newspapers and then vanished without a trace.

At precisely ten o’clock on the morning of October 1, Judge Valen¬ tine hurried into his third-floor courtroom, mounted the bench, and looked toward the clerk of the court.

On some fundamental level it is undoubtedly true that true-crime writing appeals to what William James called the “aboriginal capacity for mur¬ derous excitement,” a capacity that persists even among the most de¬ cent and law-abiding citizens.

Strang asked if he should not waylay and kill the supposed offender, and Mrs. Whipple eagerly assented.

That the criminal possessed no ordinary amount of nerve and self-control under the most trying circumstances, can not for a moment be ques¬ tioned; nor can it be truthfully averred that his courage was merely the result of stolid phlegm and natural insensibility.

The savor ofsmoking blood is peculiarly appetizing, and the dulcet note of the pistol is soothing to the senses; while the sight ofreeking corpses scattered at intervals along 82 • Ambrose Bierce the sidewalks, is mildly exhilarating.

...ment since the late operation by the Young Mens Christian Associa¬ tion; Embezzlements are quiet; some improvement is looked for with continued favorable White Pine developments; Murders, neglected; Juvenile delinquencies are lively; Election frauds, out of season; Cus¬ tom House, ditto, command attention; Perjuries, brisk, since the oper¬ ator, Josselyn, has been booked for San Quentin; Abortions are kept...

But he is still very much alive and very busy with writs, petitions and psychoanalysis, and he will still be alive long after most of us are no more.