Bestial (11 page)

The page-one story in the next day’s
San Francisco Chronicle
, headlined
FIEND MURDERER STRANGLES WOMAN IN SAN JOSE HOME
, sent shock waves throughout the area. As the story noted, the appalling murder of Mrs. Beal appeared to be the work of the “same fiend who two weeks ago strangled a woman in similar circumstances in San Francisco.”

That conjecture was confirmed late Wednesday afternoon by Mr. H. S. Bailey, proprietor of an ice cream parlor directly across the street from the Beals’ apartment building. Questioned by police, Bailey recalled that he had spotted a sallow-faced man hurrying from the building at around 4:30
P.M
., the approximate time of the murder according to the findings of Coroner Williams. Bailey’s description matched the one provided by Merton Newman, nephew of the fiend’s previous victim, who had travelled to San Jose to assist with the investigation. Bailey was immediately taken to the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation where, as the papers reported, he was shown photographs of “every degenerate known to police” in the hope that he would be able to identify the culprit.

In the meantime, the San Jose police turned for advice to a specialist in abnormal psychology, Dr. L. E. Stocking, head of a local mental hospital, who declared authoritatively that the killer was unquestionably “a maniac possessing extreme criminal cunning.”

The news that a homicidal maniac was at large in San Jose set off a full-blown panic, particularly among the city’s female population. The police were inundated with phone calls from women reporting close encounters with the fiend. Some of these callers were landladies, like Mrs. F. C. Rochester of the Melrose apartments, who claimed that, the previous Friday, a “suspicious character” had appeared at her door to apply for a job as a handyman. Something about his appearance made Mrs. Rochester so nervous that, excusing herself, she ran to a neighbor’s for help. By the time she and the neighbor returned, however, the mysterious stranger had fled. Unfortunately, the detailed physical description she gave to police did not tally at all with the strangler’s known attributes.

Like Mrs. Rochester’s story, most of the ostensible “leads” that flooded police headquarters in the days following Laura Beal’s murder were utterly useless, either facts that had no bearing on the case or sheer, overwrought fantasy. In spite of their dubious quality, however, at least two of these tales were taken seriously. One came from a woman named Mrs. D. L. Currier of 33 Hester Avenue, who reported that, on Friday afternoon, while napping in her bedroom
with her four-year-old son, she became aware of a strange noise and opened her eyes to see “an unkempt man standing over her.”

Screaming in terror, she leapt from her bed and fled the room “with the fiend in close pursuit.” He managed to seize the hem of her nightdress, ripping off a strip of the garment as she bolted for the front door. She had just pulled open the door when the maniac overtook her. Gripping her in his powerful arms, he stuffed a pocket handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her cries, then wound the torn strip of nightdress around her neck, preparing to strangle her. Struggling wildly, Mrs. Currier managed to wrest herself out of his grasp but, in doing so, fell across the threshold, struck her head on the doorframe, and—as she explained to the police—was “rendered unconscious.” When she awoke sometime later, the fiend, apparently fearing “that passersby might be attracted should he attempt to carry out his nefarious purpose in public view,” had fled.

Later that same afternoon, Miss Ethel Ehlert was alone in her father’s plumbing shop at 1060 Alameda when, in her words, a “tall man of uncouth appearance, with several days’ growth of beard on his face” entered the store. When Miss Ehlert asked what he wanted, he stepped up to the counter, looked at her with “an evil leer,” and responded, “Nothing.”

Suddenly, he lunged across the counter, seized her wrists, and tried to drag her into his arms. Yanking herself free of his grasp, she dashed to the end of the counter towards the rear door “with the fiend in pursuit.” Bursting into the alley, Miss Ehlert, according to her account, sped around to the front of the building, ran back into the store, slammed and locked the door, then raced to the back door and threw the latch—just as the fiend, who had chased her all around the building, came rushing up. Pressing his “ugly face” to the door pane, he “stood there leering” at her until he saw her snatch up the telephone to summon the police, at which point he “took to his heels and fled.”

The wild-eyed accounts of Mrs. Currier and Miss Ehlert, blazoned as unvarnished truth on the front page of Saturday’s
Chronicle
, plunged the citizens of San Jose into a state of near hysteria. “San Jose homes were in the grip of terror,” the paper reported. “Women are keeping behind locked doors.
Children are not being permitted to leave the house alone. Men are secretly arming themselves.”

Given this frenzied state of affairs, the whole city must have heaved a sigh of relief when Sunday’s edition hit the stands.
STRANGLER MANIAC SUSPECT JAILED BY SAN JOSE POLICE
read the headline.

A police detective named Thomas Short made the arrest late Saturday afternoon. The suspect was a thirty-three-year-old Austrian immigrant named Joe Kesesek whose description tallied closely with that of the “strangler maniac”—dark hair, olive complexion, barrel chest, unusually long arms. When Short spotted him “acting suspiciously” on Market Street, Kesesek was dressed in a drab army shirt, the same kind of garment that the strangler was wearing when he fled Clara Newman’s house in San Francisco.

Taken into custody, Kesesek (as Short later explained to reporters) began talking “in a rambling manner, all of his talk being about women.” At times, his speech was so garbled that the detective couldn’t begin to understand it—a sure sign, as far as Short was concerned, that the man was dangerously unbalanced.

While the suspect was being booked, two other detectives proceeded to 53 Market Street, a dingy little fleabag that Kesesek had given as his address. But if the cops hoped to discover evidence that would link the Austrian to either murder, they came away disappointed. All they managed to turn up in Kesesek’s room were five dollars in cash, a key, and a letter—written in German—to a woman named Mary Ritter.

Back in the stationhouse, Kesesek, whose babbling clearly had less to do with his presumed mental pathology than with sheer terror at being collared as the strangler suspect, had calmed down sufficiently to give a perfectly lucid account of his recent history to Police Chief John Black. According to Kesesek, he had been working as a handyman in the Veterans’ Home near Sawtelle until two weeks earlier, when he decided to go to San Francisco to seek treatment for his asthma. Along the way, he had stopped off at a hospital in San Luis Obispo, where a doctor had given him some medicine for his condition. The medicine bottle had, in fact, been found in Kesesek’s possession at the time of his arrest.

Continuing his journey northward, Kesesek had encountered a traffic officer outside Salinas. At that point, Kesesek—who had been travelling by foot when he couldn’t thumb a ride—was flat broke. He appealed to the policeman, who gave him five dollars out of his own pocket for a room. Kesesek arrived in San Jose early Saturday morning and immediately rented a bed in the Market Street flophouse. After settling into his squalid quarters, he had gone out for a stroll and was promptly identified as the “strangler maniac” by Detective Short, although—as Kesesek now insisted—he was nowhere near San Jose on the previous Tuesday when Laura Beal’s murder had occurred.

The day after Kesesek related this story, Monday, March 8, 1926, several witnesses came forward who confirmed every portion of his alibi. The Austrian was back on the street before noon.

By the time of his release, rumors had begun circulating that the
real
“strangler maniac” had been seen leaving the city on the afternoon of the murder with an unknown companion. According to witnesses, the two men had been hiking southward over Monterrey Boulevard.

It was alarming, of course, to think that the fiend had escaped, but at least San Jose was rid of him—a comforting thought to the citizenry.

As the days and weeks passed without further incidents, San Franciscans began breathing easier, too. Though the vicious killer of two elderly landladies remained at large, it seemed clear that he had left the Bay Area.

But he hadn’t left. He was only taking a respite—and it wouldn’t last long.

†

Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra

Thus speaks the red judge, “Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob.” But I say unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery.

E
very afternoon around 2:00
P.M
. Mrs. Lillian St. Mary put on her hat and coat and went out to do her daily shopping. The sixty-three-year-old San Francisco woman, who had been separated from her husband for a dozen years, lived at 1073 Dolores Street with her adult son, James, a secretary for an official of the Southern Pacific Railroad. To bring in extra income, Mrs. St. Mary rented the spare rooms in her large, private house. Two of them were vacant in the summer of 1926. The others were occupied by boarders, a couple named Van der Zee and Mr. R. C. Brian, who worked in a local printing shop.

One of Mrs. St. Mary’s duties was preparing dinner for her lodgers. Early each afternoon, she would make the rounds of the neighborhood shops, picking up provisions for the evening meal.

On this particular day—Thursday, June 10, 1926—Mrs. St. Mary was just about to head out on her daily expedition. Her coat and hat were already on, her purse was in her hands.

At that moment, the doorbell sounded. Walking to the front door, the elderly woman pulled it open and found
herself facing a swarthy, heavyset young man, neatly dressed in a blue pinstriped suit. He was looking for a place to stay, he explained, and had seen the “Room for Rent” sign in her front window.

Mrs. St. Mary invited him inside. “Lucky you came when you did,” she said. “I was just about to walk out the door.”

Leading the way up to the second floor, she opened the door to the furnished room and stepped inside. The stranger entered behind her. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he carefully closed the door and threw the lock. Hearing the metallic click, Mrs. St. Mary turned. Police later speculated that she may have tried to scream. But she never had a chance. Before she could utter a sound, his hands were on her throat.

It was one of the boarders, R. C. Brian, who found the old lady’s body. Returning from work around 5:00
P.M.
, Brian was surprised to find the kitchen empty. Normally, Mrs. St. Mary could be found working at the counter or standing by the stove, busily preparing dinner.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Brian noticed that the door to the unoccupied room was ajar. He paused at the doorway and glanced inside. And froze.

The landlady was stretched atop the bed, her mouth agape, her glazed eyes bulging behind her thick-lensed spectacles. Her steel-gray hair, normally pinned back into a tidy bun, was in wild disarray, and her clothes were badly dishevelled, the cotton dress shoved almost to her waist, exposing her splayed, spindly legs.

Even from the doorway, Brian could see that she was dead. Turning on his heels, he half-ran, half-stumbled down the stairway and ran into the parlor to telephone the police.

First on the scene was Sergeant F. P. Suttman, who made a brief examination of the room. After noting several significant details, including a still-damp urine stain on the rug, Suttman contacted the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation. Then he posted himself at the doorway and stood guard until a team of detectives showed up.

From the evidence of the urine stain, apparently produced when the victim had voided her bladder, the investigators
concluded that Mrs. St. Mary had had been attacked in the center of the room. The ugly fingermarks on her throat showed how savagely she had been throttled. So did the nine broken ribs Police Surgeon Selby Strange discovered during the autopsy. Evidently, the killer had knelt with the full weight of his body on the frail old lady’s chest while strangling her.

The fact that her eyeglasses were still on her face suggested that she had not put up a struggle. The attack had been too swift. The killer had gotten his hands around her throat before she could even utter a cry. Mrs. Herman Van der Zee, a boarder who lived directly beneath the murder room, had been at home the entire day and never heard a sound.

Before fleeing the room, the killer—for reasons known only to himself—had taken care to arrange Mrs. St. Mary’s body on the bed, setting her hat on the mattress beside her and placing her folded topcoat underneath her feet. Though the landlady’s purse (reportedly containing five dollars in cash) was missing, she was still wearing the pearl necklace and jeweled earrings she had put on in preparation for leaving the house.

Clearly, the motive for the attack wasn’t robbery. It was criminal depravity. Dr. Strange’s autopsy, conducted later that evening, confirmed that, like the previous victims, the sixty-three-year-old landlady had been sexually assaulted after death.

Though Mrs. St. Mary’s estranged husband, Joseph, was brought down to police headquarters for routine questioning, it seemed clear that the killer was the same maniac who had already taken two lives in the Peninsula area, the one that the papers were now calling “the Dark Strangler.” The testimony of a streetcar conductor named Al Wolf bolstered that assumption.

Appearing at headquarters first thing Friday morning, Wolf told police that, at approximately 2:40
P.M.
the previous afternoon, a swarthy, heavyset man, roughly forty years old, had boarded the Number 11 trolley at Twenty-third and Dolores streets. Though there were plenty of empty seats, the man stood near the front of the car, fidgeting so badly
that Wolf kept shooting him curious glances. Then, after riding only one block, the strange, jittery man had leapt from the car and fled down Dolores Street.