Bestial (19 page)

After two months of investigation, the killer’s identity remained unknown, though the likeliest candidates were the pastor’s wronged wife and her two brothers, one of whom was reputed to be a crack shot. When Mrs. Hall—a wealthy socialite with many powerful friends in the community—let it be known that she wanted the circus to end, a grand jury was quickly convened. After five days of hearings, it failed to issue an indictment. Mrs. Hall promptly set sail for Europe, and the nation was compelled to seek its titillation elsewhere.

Four years later, however, in a bid to boost its circulation, William Randolph Hearst’s fledgling tabloid the New York
Daily Mirror
dredged up some new evidence in the case and plastered the front page of its July 16, 1926, edition with a sensational headline:
HALL-MILLS MURDER MYSTERY BARED
. Over the course of the following week, the tabloid trumpeted one frenzied charge after another:
HALL’S BRIBERY REVEALED, MRS. HALL’S SPIES HELD TOWN IN TERROR, HOW HIDDEN HAND BALKED HALL MURDER JUSTICE
.

The strategy worked. Not only did the
Mirror’s
circulation jump, but its strident calls for action forced the governor of New Jersey to reopen the case. Finally, on July 28, 1926, Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall—along with her brothers, Willie and Henry—was arrested for the murder of her husband, Edward, and his inamorata, Mrs. Eleanor Mills.

“The Trial of the Century” (as it was immediately dubbed by the press) began on the morning of Wednesday, November 3, 1926, in Somerville, New Jersey. The courthouse was
crammed with hundreds of reporters, who would file more than twelve million words during the trial’s spectacular twenty-three-day run. The notoriously stodgy
New York Times
, which normally sniffed at such lurid matters, not only kept four full-time stenographers on the scene but actually covered the case more extensively than the tabloids. (When asked about this seeming contradiction, publisher Adolph S. Ochs loftily replied, “The yellows see such stories only as opportunities for sensationalism. When the
Times
gives a great amount of space to such stories, it turns out authentic sociological documents.”) Among the celebrity spectators were evangelist Billy Sunday (whose campaign against “Demon Rum” had helped bring about Prohibition); novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart; and legendary newsman Damon Runyan.

The trial offered more than its share of melodramatic moments, including the public reading of the Reverend Hall’s steamy love letters; the questioning of Mrs. Hall (nicknamed “The Iron Widow” because of her stolid demeanor); and—most sensationally—the testimony of a purported eyewitness, a farmwife named Jane Gibson, dubbed “The Pig Woman” because she raised Poland China hogs. Dying of cancer, Mrs. Gibson, attended by a doctor and two nurses, was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher and placed on an iron hospital bed facing the jury box. During her testimony—a gripping (if highly dubious) account of the grisly double murder—her own aged mother sat in the front row of the gallery, wringing her gnarled hands and muttering, “She’s a liar! She’s a liar! She’s a liar!”

For three solid weeks, the dramatic doings in Somerville kept the whole country in thrall. Every morning, Americans followed the case in their daily papers as though devouring the latest installment of the world’s juiciest potboiler. During the height of the Hall-Mills hysteria, only the most extraordinary news could dislodge the trial from the headlines or distract the public from the sensational proceedings, from the Iron Widow’s steely testimony and the Pig Woman’s shocking tale.

In the end, the jury would believe the former over the latter. Mrs. Hall and her brothers would be acquitted of the charges (and would promptly sue the
Mirror
for three million dollars). Before that happened, however, something extraordinary
did
take place in San Francisco—something so purely alarming that, when it made the headlines on November 19, even the Pig Woman’s riveting story was relegated to second place.

Almost three months had passed since the murder of Mary Nisbet, the last of the strangler’s Bay Area victims. During that time, occasional scare stories would appear in the papers—reports of women who had been attacked in their homes, ostensibly by the strangler.

In late October, for example, the
Chronicle
ran a piece about Mrs. Josephine Allen, a thirty-four-year-old war widow who rented rooms in her house at 1463 Post Street. On the morning of October 26, a strange man appeared at her front door and asked to see a room. No sooner had Mrs. Allen led him up to the second floor than he suddenly seized her by the throat and began choking her. Putting up a fierce struggle, Mrs. Allen managed to break free and dash for the staircase. But her assailant overtook her, and the two began to grapple again at the head of the stairs.

The noise attracted one of the tenants, a Filipino man named Cruz Marcuse, who poked his head out of his room. Spotting him, the stranger shoved Mrs. Allen aside, then whipped a straight razor from his pocket and came at Marcuse, who ducked back into his room and slammed the door.

Mrs. Allen, meanwhile, had stumbled down the stairs and made for the telephone. She had just been connected to the station house when the stranger came bolting down the stairs and out the front door. By the time the police arrived, he was long gone.

Just a few days later, at around eight in the evening, a thirty-five-year-old woman named Glady Mullins stepped out of her house to deposit some trash in her backyard garbage bin. Suddenly, she was seized from behind. Powerful hands clapped a gag to her mouth and began binding her arms with a length of rope. At that moment, however, her next-door neighbor, Frank Hicks—who was just arriving home from his job-pulled his car into the alleyway between the two houses. In the glare of his headlights, he saw Mrs. Mullins lying on the ground, a hulking figure looming above
er. As Hicks jumped from his car, the stranger turned, leapt over the backyard fence, and vanished into the night.

Both these episodes were reported in the
San Francisco Chronicle
as the work of the “Dark Strangler.” In truth, however, it was impossible to know who had really attacked the two women, or even if it had been the same man. In spite of its inflammatory headline—
S.F. WOMAN ATTACKED IN HOME BY STRANGLER
—the
Chronicle
conceded that Mrs. Allen’s description of her assailant did “not tally in many points with that” of the notorious landlady killer. And Mrs. Mullins, who had been jumped from behind, hadn’t gotten a look at her attacker at all.

Indeed, some police officials firmly believed that the strangler was long gone from the Bay Area, which had presumably gotten too hot for him. The recent crimes up in Portland certainly suggested that he had decamped for new hunting grounds. It was more than likely, so these authorities opined, that he had left California for good.

Others, however, including Police Chief O’Brien, believed that it was only a matter of time before the strangler struck again in the Bay City. On Thursday, November 18 (the very day that the Pig Woman was delivering her dramatic sickbed testimony on the other side of the continent), Chief O’Brien’s prediction came true.

The victim was Mrs. William Anna Edmonds, who occupied a spacious, two-story house at 3524 Fulton Street, directly across from Golden Gate Park. The middle-aged widow had been more-or-less housebound for the previous three weeks, having slipped down the main staircase and broken her shoulder blade. Even before the accident, Mrs. Edmonds had been thinking of selling her house and moving into smaller, more manageable quarters. With her husband gone and her grown son Raoul living on his own, the house had come to seem oppressive—too big and empty for a lone, aging woman. As a result, she had recently placed a classified ad in the
Chronicle
and a “For Sale” sign in one of the big bay windows fronting the park.

At around six on Thursday evening, Raoul arrived at the house to discuss the plans for his mother’s fifty-sixth birthday, which was to fall on the following day. He rang the doorbell but received no response. Puzzled, he walked
around to the rear of the house and discovered that the back door was open. That seemed very odd. His mother, nervous under the best of circumstances, had felt even more vulnerable since her accident. She always made sure to lock her doors when she was alone.

Inside the house, Raoul called out to his mother, but she did not reply. Quickly, he began searching the rooms. By the time he reached the second floor, he was already in the grip of alarm. He checked the bedrooms, but they were empty. That left only one place to look, the “radio room,” where his mother liked to relax in her armchair and listen to music on her handsome RCA console.

Trying the door, Raoul was startled to discover it locked. He had never known his mother to lock it before. Doing his best to control the trembling of his hands, he used his pocket knife to jiggle open the lock.

Inside, his mother’s dead body lay sprawled on the floor, her gray hair in a tangle, her ankle-length skirt yanked up to her knees. A closer examination of Mrs. Edmonds’ corpse revealed that the jewelry she normally wore, two diamond rings and a pair of diamond earrings, were missing from her body. The police later ascertained that her purse had also been stolen from her bedroom.

At first, the police hesitated to impute the crime to the “Dark Strangler.” True, the circumstances of the case seemed chillingly familiar, a lone matron murdered in her home after placing a classified ad. But except for two faint bruises on the victim’s neck, there were no apparent signs of a violent struggle. Nor had the killer gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the body. The missing jewelry led some investigators to believe that Mrs. Edmonds had been killed during a robbery.

Three things happened on Friday, however, that dispelled any doubts about the crime. First, a witness came forward—a neighbor named Margery Patch, who appeared at police headquarters early Friday morning. According to Mrs. Patch’s story, at around 1:30 the previous afternoon, she had dropped by Mrs. Edmonds’ house and found the widow in her first-floor sitting room talking to a “strange man.” When Mrs. Edmonds explained that she was “engaged in a business deal” relating to the sale of her house, Mrs. Patch excused
herself and left—but not before getting a good look at the stranger. The description she gave the police—well-dressed working man, about thirty-five to forty years old, smooth-shaven, with dark hair and olive complexion—corresponded closely to that of the “Dark Strangler.”

That robbery had not been the motive behind the murder was further confirmed on Friday afternoon when pathologist Z. E. Bolin ascertained that Mrs. Edmonds had not only been throttled to death but sexually assaulted as well.

The most dramatic development of all, however, occurred on Friday evening. At approximately 6:00
P.M.
, a pregnant, twenty-eight-year-old woman, Mrs. H. C. Murray of 1114 Grove Street, Burlingame, was viciously attacked in her home. This time, there was absolutely no doubt that the culprit was the “Dark Strangler.” Everything about the incident conformed precisely to his previous attacks, except for one crucial difference. Mrs. Murray lived to tell her tale.

She told it to reporters from her hospital bed, where she was recovering from the trauma of the episode. Mrs. Murray’s house had been on the market for the past several months. Like Mrs. Edmonds, she had taken out an ad in the papers. There was also a hand-painted “For Sale” sign planted on the front lawn.

At around five o’clock on Friday evening, while her husband was still at work, someone came to the door.

“He saw the sign and rang the bell,” Mrs. Murray told the newsmen who were gathered at her bedside. “I opened the door. I had not the slightest thought of meeting the strangler, but I always make it a practice to take every precaution when showing strange men the house. I kept a considerable distance from him from the moment I let him in—at least six or eight feet. I also left the front door open.”

The dark-haired man, standing about five feet seven or eight inches tall, looked perfectly presentable. He was dressed in a decent blue serge suit with a white shirt, mustard-colored tie, tan shoes, and brown fedora. Doffing the hat, he began to converse in a polite, well-spoken way that, while not entirely disarming her suspicions, served to put the young woman at her ease.

“He first asked the price of the place,” Mrs. Murray continued, “and then said he would like to look at it. I let him
in, and he examined the rooms in much detail. He is evidently very familiar with building and construction, for he used expressions relating to such things that I did not understand myself.”

While touring the rooms, the stranger began chatting about himself, explaining that he was planning to get married in just three days. “This will be my third marriage,” he said. “The first time my wife nagged me to death. The second one I took to dances and would find sitting on the laps of other men.” He gave a bitter grunt. “I couldn’t stand that.”

There was something in his tone that made Mrs. Murray pause and take a closer look at the stranger. “I was curious to see the sort of man the woman was going to get.” She judged his age to be around thirty-two or thirty-five. He was nicely groomed—clean-shaven, his receding black hair neatly trimmed, as though he had just been to the barber. He had thick black eyebrows and an olive complexion, though he was clearly not a foreigner. His two most striking features were his dark, piercing eyes and strong, white, perfectly even teeth.

Though Mrs. Murray did not feel at all threatened by the dark-complexioned stranger, she continued to keep her distance from him as they toured the house, taking care to remain “six or eight feet away from him during the whole interview.” She was struck by the close attention that he paid to certain details—closets, door locks, and especially ceilings. Only in retrospect did she perceive the diabolical cunning behind the stranger’s behavior.

“I realize now,” she told the reporters, “that he was trying to get me to look up towards the ceiling, so that he could get behind me and grab my throat.”