Bestial (20 page)

Mrs. Murray had deliberately left all the window shades up. Entering the main bedroom, the stranger stepped over to the window and casually put his hand on the shade-pull. “Whoever designed this house sure put the windows in places to give plenty of light,” he said. Then, as if testing to make sure that the roller functioned properly, he pulled down the shade and left it that way.

As Mrs. Murray was quick to admit, she then did something exceptionally foolish, carelessly letting it slip that her
husband would not be home from work until around six. Reaching into his pocket, the stranger pulled out his watch and consulted it. “I wonder if I have the right time,” he said, frowning. “My watch has been running kind of slow lately. It says five-thirty.” Checking the alarm clock on her night table, Mrs. Murray confirmed that his watch was accurate.

Propped up on several pillows in her hospital bed, Mrs. Murray (who had just entered her eighth month of pregnancy) paused in her recitation for a sip of water. Then, as if gathering her strength, she drew a deep breath and related the dramatic climax of her tale.

“The final place we inspected was the screened porch in the rear of the house. He seemed particularly interested in this and several times called my attention to the ceiling. I kept my distance, however, though I never once dreamed he was the strangler. After exhausting every pretext for lingering, he started out.

“When he reached the front door, he suddenly turned and said, ‘There’s something about that porch I’d like to see again.’ I returned there with him. As we stepped onto the porch, he suddenly pointed through the screen to the garage outside. ‘What sort of roof is that on the garage?’ he asked.”

The suddenness of the question caught Mrs. Murray off guard. “For the first time, I turned my back to him—and in that instant I felt his hands closing around my neck from the rear.” The realization hit her with sickening force. She was in the grip of the “Dark Strangler.”

But unlike his previous victims, Mrs. Murray was a strapping young woman. Screaming wildly, she tore at his hands with her fingernails. “Fear must have given me strength, for I succeeded in breaking that terrible grip.” Turning on him, she clawed at his face, then threw herself “through the screen door and nearly fell down the steps leading from the porch. Bleeding from his scratches, the strangler turned and dashed through the house, fleeing through the front door.”

Still screaming for help, Mrs. Murray ran to the front of the house, reaching Grove Steet just as the strangler disappeared around a corner. At that moment, an automobile came cruising along the street. “Stop that man!” Mrs. Murray
screeched. Instead of giving chase, however, the car slowed down.

Leaping onto the running board, Mrs. Murray began shouting at the driver. “That man! He attacked me! He’s the strangler!” Other neighbors, meanwhile, had come bursting out of their houses to see what the commotion was about. Suddenly, the shock of the episode seemed to hit the pregnant woman in one overpowering blow. Sliding from the car, she collapsed onto the pavement, while a neighbor ran to call the police.

Within the hour, the entire police forces of Burlingame and San Mateo, assisted by a large contingent of armed volunteers, was scouring the area. A cordon was thrown around the entire district. Roadblocks were erected, vehicles stopped, passengers checked. A posse of men armed with shotguns patrolled the wood and marshes. Hospitals and doctors were alerted, in the event that the killer sought medical treatment for the injuries Mrs. Murray had inflicted. In spite of these efforts, however, the “Dark Strangler” managed to slip away again.

With the killer on the loose somewhere in the Bay Area, San Francisco Police Chief O’Brien called a press conference the following morning. Calling the strangler “the most dangerous criminal now at large,” Chief O’Brien urged “women who have houses for sale or rooms for rent to use the utmost caution in admitting strangers of the general description of the strangler.” He placed special emphasis on the deceptive, Jekyll-Hyde nature of the man. “He is not of a repulsive appearance. It is a mistake to believe that he has the features of an ape or gorilla, or that he is uncouth in speech or manner. He is able to gain an amicable footing with women through his suave manner.”

With a canniness “typical of criminals of his type,” the strangler had evidently modified his usual m.o. “A month ago,” said the chief, “I figured that it was about time for one of the strangler’s periodical outbreaks in this city, and I asked that an order be issued, instructing members of the department to warn women lodging-house keepers. The strangler seems now to have switched his operations from rented rooms to houses for sale.”

The chief concluded his speech with a grim reminder that “no woman in San Francisco is safe with this man at large. The Police Department is doing everything possible to capture him, but it must have the cooperation of the citizenry to the fullest extent.”

While Chief O’Brien had to strike a delicate balance in his pronouncements—sounding an alarm without provoking a panic—the press labored under no such constraints. The back-to-back outrages, the rape-murder of a middle-aged invalid and vicious assault on a young mother-to-be, touched off an orgy of tabloid sensationalism.

Though Mrs. Murray had escaped from the strangler’s clutches with little more than a badly bruised neck, the papers reported that she was in critical condition, desperately fighting for her life as well as that of her unborn infant. Her assailant—the same “vile killer” who had murdered not only Mrs. Edmonds but five other Bay Area women—was a “human cobra,” a “moron with a strange twist in his warped brain,” who nevertheless possessed a “fiendish cunning and audacity” that had allowed him to “effect an easy escape through a cordon of police and a shotgun posse of highly aroused volunteer citizens.”

The
San Francisco Chronicle
even coined a colorful new nickname for the killer, one that echoed the most infamous pseudonym of modern times. It first appeared on November 21 in the account of Mrs. Murray’s ordeal. The article was published without a byline, but whoever wrote it clearly perceived something essential about the killer.

The headline of the article read:
WOMAN TELLS OF HER FIGHT WITH “JACK THE STRANGLER
.”

†

Charles Tennant

In none of these cases was murder necessary… . It is simply that the killer took delight in his work—he killed for the satisfaction it gave him.

T
he new nickname never caught on, possibly because it lacked the ominous ring of “the Dark Strangler.” But in certain ways, it was more apt. It suggested that the strangler belonged to the same deadly breed as the Whitechapel Monster, to that psychopathic species we now call serial killers. Moreover, it acknowledged the strangler’s extreme cunning, his ability (like Saucy Jack’s) to stay a step ahead of the police and make a mockery of their efforts to catch him.

Nevertheless, there were important differences between the two killers. While the Ripper’s name remains synonymous with serial sex-murder, his final tally of victims was relatively modest by modern-day standards: five women slain over several months. By November 21, 1926, the “Dark Strangler” had already exceeded that total, indeed, had nearly doubled it. Mrs. A. C. Murray, the pregnant young housewife from Burlingame, had barely escaped becoming his tenth murder victim. Mrs. Florence Fithian Monks of Seattle wouldn’t be as lucky.

According to acquaintances, it was vanity that got Mrs. Monks killed, her insistence on flaunting her fanciest jewelry
even when performing the most routine of chores. To make a simple trip to the grocers, she would deck herself out like Queen Marie of Rumania. Her hands were adorned with no less than four diamond rings worth at least $5,000. In addition, she habitually wore a diamond bracelet and earrings, a triple-strand choker of genuine pearls, a cluster of jeweled lodge pins, and—on the bosom of her camisole—a large diamond sunburst valued at over $3,000.

Her friends, people like Mr. and Mrs. Harry G. Allen, repeatedly cautioned her about the dangers of such ostentation. The gems she insisted on displaying so freely were, they warned, “a temptation to almost any thief.” The Allens felt especially anxious because Mrs. Monks, a forty-eight-year-old widow who suffered from a heart ailment, was often alone. Several times a week, she made the long drive from her country estate in Echo Lake Park to her home on Capitol Hill, staying by herself in the big, empty house. But Mrs. Monks scoffed at these warnings. “I’m not afraid,” she would say with a carefree little wave of one ring-laden hand. Unbeknownst to the Allens and her other good friends, Mrs. Monks had even more jewels on her person than the ones she kept on constant display. Strapped to her right leg, just below the knee, was a small sack of diamonds. Other valuable items of jewelry, including two diamond-studded brooches, were wrapped in a handkerchief and pinned to her underclothing.

The twice-widowed woman had inherited money from both her husbands. She had relocated to Seattle from New York City five years earlier with her second spouse, John J. Monks. Mr. Monks had died soon after the move, leaving his wife with substantial real estate holdings in Manhattan. Such was the size of her fortune that when, in late 1925, she suffered a $35,000 loss through a failed investment, she did not even blink, dismissing the sum as “a trifle.” Among her friends, she was rumored to be worth at least $500,000.

Having decided to make her country place her sole residence, Mrs. Monks had been trying to dispose of the Capitol Hill house, located at 723 12th Avenue North, since early fall. She had placed a “For Sale” sign in the parlor window and taken out weekly ads in the
Seattle Times
. The most recent had appeared on Monday, November 22. The ad indicated
that Mrs. Monks would be at the house between 11:00
A.M.
and 3:00
P.M
. on Wednesday the twenty-fourth to show the property to interested parties.

She showed up a day early, driving down from Echo Lake Park first thing Tuesday morning. Not long after her arrival, she placed a telephone call to her friend, Mrs. Elsie Allen of 4230 11th Avenue, N.E. The two women discussed plans for several upcoming social functions, including a dinner party Mrs. Monks was organizing for members of her lodge, the Order of Amaranth (of which she was royal matron).

Soon afterwards, she called another friend, Mrs. S. P. Brautigan of 4419 Dayton Avenue. During this conversation, Mrs. Monks mentioned that she was expecting a visit later in the day from a fellow lodge member named J. M. Coy.

Mrs. Monks’ neighbors were a couple named Edward and Anna McDonald. At around noon on Tuesday, Mrs. McDonald glanced out her kitchen window and saw a “shabby-looking” automobile pull up in front of the house next door. A tall, thin, gray-haired man—dressed in a wrinkled gray suit and threadbare raincoat—emerged from the car, climbed the front-porch steps, and rang Mrs. Monks’ bell. Seconds later, Mrs. Monks came to the door and, after exchanging a few words with the stranger, let him in. Mrs. McDonald, assuming the man was there to see the house, returned to her cooking.

Approximately one hour later, a couple named Carpenter arrived to view the property. They were admitted by Mrs. Monks, who proceeded to lead them on a tour of the house, beginning in the basement, then moving up to the first-floor rooms. They were just about to ascend to the second story when the doorbell rang. Excusing herself, Mrs. Monks hurried to the door and admitted a tall, blond man with a ruddy face and the air and appearance of a laborer. When they departed about twenty minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter noticed the man seated in a small room off the main hallway waiting to speak with Mrs. Monks.

Whatever business the blond man had with Mrs. Monks must have been concluded by 2:30
P.M.
That was when she telephoned her caterer, Otto Kirchbach of the Art Bake Shop, to discuss arrangements for a party she was planning
for sixty members of the Order of Amaranth. It was scheduled for December 4 at the Rainier Masonic Temple.

“It was to be very elaborate,” Kirchbach later recalled. “I had bought turkeys and other things for it, and she wanted the turkeys carved in front of the guests. She also asked me to change her order for punch to one for cider and to supply small raisins.”

After about fifteen minutes, Mrs. Monks suddenly broke off the conversation. “I’ve got to go now, Otto,” she said, interrupting him in the middle of a sentence. “There’s someone at the door.” Bidding him goodbye, she hung up the phone.

Later, Kirchbach would wonder if that “someone” had been Mrs. Monks’ killer.

At approximately 8:00
P.M.
that evening, J. M. Coy, Mrs. Monks’ fellow lodge member, showed up as promised to discuss the plans for the big dinner party. He rang the bell again and again. But much to his surprise, Mrs. Monks did not respond.

Proceeding to a nearby drugstore, he called her from a pay phone but got no answer. He returned to the house and walked all around it. The windows were dark. Puzzled, Mr. Coy headed back to his house.

At around 6:00
P.M.
the following evening, Wednesday, November 23, 1926, Edward McDonald looked out his parlor window and saw a middle-aged couple standing on the front porch of Mrs. Monks’ house. The man, who wore an angry scowl, was pounding on the door. Mr. McDonald went out to investigate.

The man, who gave his name as Hansen, explained that he and his wife had called Mrs. Monks the previous week and made an appointment to inspect the house. They had come a long way and were much put out to find that she was not there.

Since Mrs. Monks spent only part of each week in the city, she had arranged for McDonald to show the house when she wasn’t there. Fetching his key, McDonald let the couple inside and began to lead them around the premises, but the house was clearly not to their liking. Before they
had finished viewing the first floor, Mr. Hansen announced that he and his wife had seen enough. Thanking McDonald for his trouble, the couple departed.