Bestial (12 page)

Speaking to reporters on Friday afternoon, Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson confirmed that “this description and other circumstances leave no doubt in my mind that the so-called Dark Strangler is the man we want for the slaying of Mrs. St. Mary. He gained admission to Mrs. St. Mary’s home through the same pretense of renting a room, and the method of strangulation in each instance was similar.”

Matheson announced that he had put every member of the city’s homicide and robbery squads, ten detectives in all, on the case. With so much manpower concentrating on the investigation, he felt confident that it was only a matter of time before the strangler was apprehended.

In the meantime, he urged that all women in the region, particularly every landlady and rooming-house proprietress, follow special precautions. Under no circumstances should they enter a vacant room with a strange man, or even admit one to their premises unless a third party was present. He advised that, whenever possible, all negotiations with a stranger should be conducted through a speaking tube or over the house telephone. “Such precautions are essential,” Matheson warned, “to prevent further depredations by the strangler.”

The public response to this latest depredation was an exact replay of the reaction to the Beal murder three weeks earlier—mass hysteria, fantastic reports of hair-raising attacks, followed by short-lived relief at the news that police had arrested a suspect.

FIEND DARKENS HOUSE, THEN SURPRISES VICTIM IN BED
blared the headline of Monday’s
Chronicle
. According to a fifty-five-year-old woman named Alice Wilberg, she and her husband Edward had taken an automobile ride to the beach early Sunday afternoon. When Mrs. Wilberg, who had only recently been discharged from the hospital following a successful gallbladder operation, began feeling ill, her husband drove her back to their house at 414 Duboce Avenue. As soon as they got home, Mrs. Wilberg retired to their bedroom
to rest. Edward stayed around for a few minutes, then went out to visit friends, leaving his dozing wife alone.

About an hour later, shortly after 3:00
P.M.
, Mrs. Wilberg was roused from her nap by a strange noise in her bedroom. Opening her eyes, she was horrified to see a tall, shadowy figure looming over the bed. Though the shades were drawn and the room was shrouded in darkness, she could tell that the intruder was in a state of partial undress.

Screaming, the sickly woman tried to rise from the bed, but the stranger was too fast for her. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he struck her across the face, then dragged her from the mattress and administered several more savage blows. Then he wrapped his hands around her neck.

Fighting with a desperate strength, Mrs. Wilberg managed to loosen his choke hold long enough to plead for mercy. She told him all about her gallbladder operation and warned that her husband would be home at any minute.

At that very instant, just as his fingers were starting to tighten on her throat, the intruder was stopped by a noise from the street, a sound like that of an automobile coming to a halt. Thinking that Mrs. Wilberg’s husband had arrived, the stranger gave the kneeling woman a final blow to the face, then turned and fled the room. Swooning, Mrs. Wilberg lay in a semiconscious state until 11:00
P.M.
, when her husband returned and found her collapsed on the floor.

Though Mrs. Wilberg’s account was nearly identical to the equally thrilling (and improbable) tale related by Mrs. D. L. Currier three weeks earlier, the San Francisco police chose to regard it as authentic. Three detectives—John Sturm, John Dolan, and William Johnson—were assigned to her case. Unfortunately, Mrs. Wilberg wasn’t much help to the investigators. Though she was absolutely clear about one detail, that the man in her bedroom was partly unclothed, she claimed she could not see his face because the room was too dark. All she knew was that he was tall.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco police continued to pursue every lead. At least fifty ostensible tips were phoned hi to headquarters on Monday. Investigators followed through on every one of them; all of them proved groundless.

“We are not overlooking even the wildest and most unpromising tips,” Detective Lieutenant Charles Dullea of the
homicide squad told reporters late Monday afternoon. “And despite the fact that it means many wild goose chases, we encourage the public to cooperate in good faith with us, for this is the only hope we have of catching the dangerous criminal.”

Asked what advice he had for the citizens of San Francisco, Dullea replied that he would “personally advise elderly women who have furnished rooms to rent to take every precaution in admitting strangers to their homes and to telephone the police whenever they have something to be suspicious of.”

In making this recommendation, Dullea realized that he was opening the door to practical jokers who might be tempted to have some fun by calling in phony information. But all Dullea could do was appeal to the public’s good sense and follow up with a warning. “This is far too serious a matter for a hoax, and anyone caught playing a practical joke on the police will be dealt with severely.”

Still, the phony tips and dead-end leads continued to pour in. In spite of Dullea’s warning, some of these were deliberate hoaxes. Others were either the product of hysterical delusion or desperate, attention-getting ploys. One or two may have been based on actual incidents—though, given their particulars, it seems doubtful that even these cases involved the “Dark Strangler.”

Late Monday afternoon, for example, a fifteen-year-old Alameda girl named Helen Lawrence reported that she had been attacked by a strange man who had called at her parents’ home to inspect a vacant room. Finding the girl alone, the man had immediately grabbed her. She was saved by the proverbial bell, for at that very instant the telephone rang. Evidently mistaking the sound for the front doorbell, the intruder fled.

At almost the same instant, an elderly San Francisco woman, Mrs. L. O. Quinn, who ran a boardinghouse on Bryant Street, called the police to report that a suspicious-looking man who matched the published descriptions of the strangler had just tried to rent a room from her. A squad of policemen, headed by Captain Goff of the Southern Station, immediately set off in pursuit of the man, tracking him down within the hour. He turned out to be a slightly shady but
essentially innocuous character, well-known to some of the officers, who worked for a neighborhood junk peddler.

Tuesday’s paper brought welcome news to the tense and fearful residents of the Bay Area:
S.F. BUTCHER JAILED AS STRANGLER SUSPECT
read the headline.

The suspect was Otto Krueger, a sixty-three-year-old sausage maker whose appearance was an approximate match for that of the strangler, dark-skinned and burly, with large, powerful hands. Though Krueger was considerably older than the man the police were hunting for, his hair had not a trace of gray, and he radiated an air of youthful vigor. He could have passed for forty-five.

He was taken into custody on exceptionally sum evidence. During a boat ride on board the steamer
Admiral Fiske
, which ran between San Francisco and Los Angeles, several passengers noticed that Krueger was acting strangely, pacing on deck and muttering darkly to himself. They alerted ship officers, who contacted the Los Angeles police. On the orders of Captain of Detectives Herman Cline, Krueger was arrested as he stepped off the steamer in Los Angeles.

At first, Krueger’s odd behavior in custody encouraged his captors to believe that they had nabbed the right man. He ranted bitterly about his wife, though the two had been estranged for nearly twenty years. He claimed that he worked at a sausage-making shop at 1319 Pacific Street in San Francisco. But when police tried to contact his boss, they discovered that no such shop existed.

Just a short distance away, however, at 1331 Pacific Street, there
was
a sausage factory where Krueger had, in fact, been employed five years earlier. His former boss remembered the suspect as an erratic, unreliable worker who had left because of trouble with a union official.

Investigating Krueger’s movements on the day of Mrs. St. Mary’s murder, detectives confirmed that he had, in fact, been in San Francisco at the time, having checked into the Curtis Hotel on Valencia Street under an assumed name, “Mr. Gordon.” They were also able to ascertain that he had come to San Francisco from San Jose, “the scene” (as the
San Francisco Chronicle
pointedly observed) “of one of the strangler murders.”

At least one person, however, refused to believe that
Krueger was guilty of murder. This was Conrad Gabler, president of the local branch of the Sausage Maker’s Union, who had known the suspect for more than ten years. Speaking to a reporter on Tuesday afternoon, Gabler acknowledged that Krueger was a “peculiar-acting fellow.” But he felt sure that the sixty-three-year-old butcher was “innocent of this strangler business.”

His opinion was borne out by Merton Newman—nephew of the strangler’s first victim and the only person to have seen the killer face to face—who, after viewing mug shots of the suspect, declared that Krueger was definitely not the man. Less than twenty-four hours after being picked up by the L.A. police, the sausage-maker was set free.

Over the next few days, women throughout the Bay Area continued to report terrifying encounters with sex-crazed intruders in the darkness of their bedrooms. The San Francisco police continued to run down scores of dead-end leads, scour the streets for suspicious-looking panhandlers, and haul in derelicts by the dozen for questioning. But it soon became clear that the elusive killer had gotten away with murder once again.

By Thursday, June 17, the story had disappeared from the front pages. The only article to appear in that day’s
Chronicle
was a short, dispirited piece reporting that the strangler investigation had hit “a blank wall, without a trace or clue as to the identity of the man who claimed two lives here and one hi San Jose.” The article consisted of only a few brief paragraphs on page four. Occupying more than twice as much space on the page was a lengthy piece, complete with captioned photo, about the opera singer, Madame Claire Eugenia Smith, who—having just returned from a tour of the Hawaiian Islands—was eager to promote the immeasurable physical, moral, and social benefits of hula dancing. “If American dancing schools would only teach the hula rather than the Charleston to the young,” declared the diva, “the change would be astounding!”

†

Madame Leprince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast”

Yes, yes, said the Beast, my heart is good, but still I am a monster. Among mankind, says Beauty, there are many that deserve that name more than you.

J
ust one day later, on Friday, June 18, a week after the discovery of Lillian St. Mary’s mangled and ravaged body, the strangler struck again. At least that was the common assumption when the news of Sylvia Gaines’ brutal murder first broke.

To be sure, there were notable differences between this latest atrocity and the three that had preceded it. For one thing, the slaying took place not in northern California but in Seattle, Washington. And Sylvia Gaines was not a sixtyish landlady but a vivacious twenty-two-year-old who had grad-uated from Smith College the previous summer.

Still, the police found logical ways to account for these differences. With every detective on the San Francisco P.D. on the lookout for him, the strangler had evidently migrated northward in search of safer hunting grounds. And his choice of victim simply meant that he preyed on vulnerable females whatever their age or situation.

The details of the case, reported in papers from Seattle to San Francisco, provoked consternation up and down the coast. Sylvia Gaines had been living in Seattle for less than
a year. She had come west the previous fall to renew her relationship with her father, Wallace Cloyes Gaines, who went by the nickname “Bob.” Her parents had gotten divorced when Sylvia was a child, and she had not so much as seen her father for over sixteen years.

In the interim, Wallace Gaines, invariably described in the papers as a “disabled veteran,” had become an alcoholic, having suffered a severe case of shellshock during the Great War. He had been remarried for five years to a woman named Elizabeth, who had also taken to booze because, as she would later explain to reporters, “I always felt that it was much better for me to drink with Bob than to have him drinking alone or with someone else.”

Ever since Sylvia’s arrival on the scene, there apparently had been a good deal of tension between Wallace and his wife, provoked by the former’s allegedly “inappropriate attentions” to his nubile daughter whom he hadn’t laid eyes on since she was a kindergartner. So ugly had these quarrels become that, only a few months before Sylvia’s murder, Elizabeth had carried a pistol to the basement of their home and attempted to kill herself. After recuperating from her self-inflicted wound, she had, at her husband’s suggestion, gone off to stay with a friend in San Francisco. She was still residing there when the murder took place.

On the night of the killing, Sylvia reportedly left the house after supper to take a stroll around Green Lake, slightly less than a mile away. The lake was bordered on three sides by private houses and on the fourth by a forested area called Woodland Park. At approximately 9:30
P.M.
, a couple named Stokes, who lived in one of the lakefront homes, saw Sylvia walking along the gravel trail that circled the lake. Moments later, they spotted someone else, a husky man dressed in a blue serge suit jacket and dark gray trousers. Except for his prominent nose and strong, square chin, his features were obscured by his low-pulled cap. But he appeared to be in his forties. He was striding rapidly along the trail, as though trying to catch up with the young woman.

That was the last time Sylvia Gaines was seen alive. Her nude, ravaged body was discovered the following morning in a grove of alder trees a few yards from the lake. Her neck bore the marks of powerful fingers, and her skull had
been crushed with a rock. Police found the makeshift weapon, dabbled with blood and hair, about fifteen feet away from the corpse.