Bestial (23 page)

When the two women queried him more closely about his beliefs, Harris replied that he had recently been to some Holy Roller meetings and had attended a service at the spectacular Angelus Temple of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the golden-haired revivalist whose name had been continuously in the headlines for almost half a year. (The previous June—following a mysterious, month-long disappearance—a bruised and blistered Sister Aimee had suddenly appeared in Arizona, claiming that she had been kidnapped and held captive in Mexico. As investigators delved into her story, however, it became increasingly evident that the self-described “World’s Most Pulchritudinous Evangelist” had actually absconded for a prolonged romantic interlude with one of her married employees.)

Altogether, the young man remained at the boarding-house for four and a half days. For the most part, he stayed shut up in his room, emerging only at dusk, when he would briefly leave the house to buy the daily
Oregonian
. At one
point, he came down with what seemed to be a touch of the flu and spent much of the following day seated by the fireplace, a blanket draped around his shoulders.

At around 10:00
A.M.
on Monday, November 29 (the day of Blanche Myers’ murder), he appeared in the front hallway, suitcase in hand. He was leaving for Vancouver, Washington, he declared. Since he had paid a full week’s rent in advance, this sudden departure, less than five days after his arrival, struck the women as peculiar. It seemed doubly surprising in light of his earlier statements, that he planned to settle in Portland and go into the construction business.

It wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that Mrs. Gaylord realized with a shock just who the young man was. She was seated in the parlor, reading the newspaper account of Blanche Myers’ murder. When she came upon the description of the “Dark Strangler” suspect, she let out such a startled cry that Mrs. Yates came hurrying in from the kitchen to see what was wrong.

Mrs. Gaylord did not own a telephone. Throwing on her overcoat, she hurried to a neighbor’s house and called police headquarters.

Under ordinary circumstances, the police wouldn’t have attached any undue weight to her story. After all, they had been inundated with similar reports ever since Mrs. Myers’ death—breathless accounts from dozens of lone, local women who had found themselves confronted (often in the secrecy of their bedrooms) by dark, menacing strangers. In this case, however, there was a compelling cause to take the testimony of Mrs. Gaylord and Mrs. Yates seriously.

For reasons explicable only to himself, the man who called himself Adrian Harris had decided to bestow an extravagant gift on the two women. He had done it on the day after Thanksgiving. Descending from his bedroom in mid-morning, he had summoned them to the parlor and presented each of the astonished women with several costly pieces of jewelry.

He had given the landlady a triple-strand choker of pearls and a white-gold necklace along with several smaller items, including a gold pin and a silver-mounted fountain pen. Mrs. Yates received a diamond bracelet with matching earrings, plus a gold perfume bottle and a jeweled brooch.

Though the women had demurred, the young man was insistent. According to Mrs. Gaylord’s account, Harris had said that he “had no use” for the jewelry and wanted to share it with them because they “had so little.”

Less than fifteen minutes after receiving Mrs. Gaylord’s call, two detectives, James Mulligan and Bernard LáSalle, arrived at her home to examine the jewelry. The moment they laid eyes on it, they exchanged an excited look. Like every other police agency in the Pacific Northwest, the Portland department had received a detailed bulletin from Seattle, describing the valuables that had been stolen by the slayer of Mrs. Florence Monks.

Even at a glance, Mulligan and LaSalle could see that the jewelry which “Adrian Harris” had lavished on the two elderly widows appeared to be a precise match.

By Wednesday evening, the confiscated loot was on its way to police headquarters in Seattle, where the three most striking pieces—the white-gold necklace, triple-strand string of pearls, and diamond bracelet—were arranged on a black velvet jeweler’s tray and photographed. The picture appeared on the front page of the following day’s
Seattle Times
, along with an article explaining that the “gems were thought to be the ones stolen from slain Seattle widow, Mrs. Florence Fithian Monks.” Any of her acquaintances who recognized the jewelry were urged to contact the police without delay.

Less than forty-five minutes after the paper hit the stands, Detective Sergeant W. B. Kent received a call from Mrs. Harry G. Allen, a close friend of the victim. “Those look like Florence’s jewels,” Mrs. Allen declared. She was brought down to headquarters by squad car, where—after making a firsthand examination of the gems—she tearfully confirmed that they had belonged to her murdered friend. Later in the day, several more of Mrs. Monks’ intimates—including a neighbor, Miss Mattie Nelson, and Charles McMinimee, executor of the slain widow’s estate—positively identified the jewels.

Meanwhile, down in Portland, investigators were pursuing another lead involving Mrs. Monks’ stolen property. Shortly after the publication of Wednesday’s
Morning Oregonian
,
which ran a page-one story on the recovered jewels, no fewer than four pawnshop owners had contacted the police with precisely the same story. On the previous afternoon, a dark-complexioned young man had appeared in each of their stores, attempting to sell a white-gold woman’s lodge pin—an item which (as the brokers now realized) had been part of the loot taken from the murdered widow. None of the pawnbrokers had purchased the pin, since the young man, though apparently eager to unload it, had sniffed at their offers.

A special police detail, under the supervision of Inspectors Howell and Abbott, was immediately assigned to check out every hockshop and secondhand store in Seattle in the hope of locating the pin and tracking its seller. But this effort proved unavailing. The police
did
manage to haul in over a dozen suspects, including a forty-four-year-old Serbian who bore a striking resemblance to the published descriptions of the strangler. But all these men were promptly released when their fingerprints failed to match the ones retrieved from the iron headboard in the room where Blanche Myers had been killed.

On Thursday afternoon, the coroner’s inquest into the death of Mrs. Myers took place in Portland. Three witnesses testified at this pro forma affair—Dr. Robert Benson, the coroner’s physician who conducted the autopsy; the victim’s younger son, Lawrence, who had reported her disappearance to the police; and Alexander Muir, the owner of the boardinghouse, who had been sharing lunch with the landlady when her killer appeared at the front door. It took the jury only a few minutes to reach its foregone conclusion: “That Mrs. Blanche Myers met death by strangulation at the hands of a party or parties unknown.”

At virtually the same time in Seattle, the funeral of Florence Monks was underway in the Corinthian room of the Masonic Temple, located at Harvard Avenue and Pine Street. In accordance with Mrs. Monks’ will, the services were conducted under the auspices of Seattle Chapter No. 95, Order of the Eastern Star, the Reverend Maurice J. Bywater officiating. The temple was packed with more than 400 mourners, including the slain woman’s sister, Vivian Drummond of Flushing, New York, who had arrived the
previous afternoon with her husband, Charles. Following Mrs. Monks’ interment at Lakeview Cemetery—where she was laid to rest in a plot adjoining that of her late husband, John—Charles Drummond spoke to reporters, declaring that it was his firm intention to “devote his energies to unraveling the mystery veiling the brutal murder of his wife’s sister.”

Any doubts that Florence Monks and Blanche Myers had been strangled by the same fiendish killer were resolved on Saturday afternoon, when Detective Sergeant W. J. Sampson of Seattle’s Police Identification Bureau confirmed that fingerprints lifted from a black pocketbook in Mrs. Monks’ bedroom precisely matched the ones discovered on the iron headboard in Mrs. Myers’ rooming house. Over the next few days, police up and down the Pacific Coast made what the papers described as a “frantic effort” to locate the killer. But the manhunt led nowhere. The strangler’s whereabouts remained completely unknown, though Portland investigators did manage to turn up another eyewitness who had come into direct contact with the killer.

This was a grocer named Russell Gordon, who owned a little store on Third Street, the very one where “Adrian Harris” had purchased fourteen dollars’ worth of dinner provisions on the day before Thanksgiving. According to Gordon, “Harris” was such a pleasant, soft-spoken, and polite individual that it was almost impossible to believe he could be the notorious strangler. “Why, I never spoke to a nicer mannered fellow,” Gordon told the officers who interviewed him.

Gordon’s testimony only confirmed what the police already knew from Edna Gaylord, Sophie Yates, and others (like Mrs. H. C. Murray) who had spent time in the strangler’s company and lived to tell about it. “When not in the midst of his heinous crimes,” as the
Seattle Daily Times
reported, “the Dark Strangler has an engaging personality, quiet habits, and pleasing manners.”

In attempting to account for such a singular being, a monstrous killer whose daily demeanor gave “no intimation that he possessed any talent for crime,” the authorities were clearly at a loss. “The murderer isn’t a maniac in the sense
that he is mentally deranged,” Chief of Detectives Charles Tennant of Seattle told a gathering of reporters on Saturday, December 4. “But there must be a screw loose somewhere.”

The best explanation that authorities could come up with was that the strangler “possessed a dual personality,” making him a “real-life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In 1926, a criminal who could seem perfectly ordinary one moment and turn into a maddened sex killer the next was clearly so extraordinary that he seemed like a creature out of fantasy. The time had not yet arrived when psychopathic lust murderers, capable of concealing their malevolence behind a mask of bland normality, would be a grimly familiar feature of American society.

In the week following Blanche Myers’ murder, the main detective room on the third floor of Portland’s central police station was (as the
Oregonian
reported) “a veritable ‘mad house,’ with clerks and operators taking hundreds of telephone calls from citizens who had reports to make on suspicious characters, and a score or more of detectives working frantically, taking reports from citizens who visited the office.” Investigators dutifully followed through on all of these leads, even the most far-fetched. But none of them panned out.

On Monday, December 6, newspapers reported the arrest of a drifter named Morris Yoffee, who had arrived in Eugene, Oregon, a few days earlier. Engaging a room in a local boardinghouse, he had promptly aroused the suspicions of the proprietress, who, like virtually every other landlady in the Pacific Northwest, lived in constant vigilance of the “Dark Strangler.”

There was something furtive about Yoffee’s behavior. Since his arrival, he had remained sequestered inside his room, emerging only at mealtimes. He had also betrayed a disquieting interest in the murder of Florence Fithian Monks, sending out each afternoon for the
Seattle Daily Times
, so that he could follow the latest developments in the investigation. At the table, he conversed about the case with an enthusiasm that struck the landlady as distinctly unhealthy.

On the morning of December 6, she put in a telephone call to police headquarters. That afternoon, Chief Jenkins himself, disguised in plain clothes and posing as a prospective tenant, showed up at the rooming house to check out
the suspect. Convinced that Yoffee bore a passable resemblance to the descriptions of “Adrian Harris,” Jenkins revealed his identity and took the startled man into custody. “Am I wanted in Seattle?” Yoffee asked as he was led off to jail.

Within twelve hours, however, following a telephone conversation between Chief Jenkins and Detective Captain William Justus of Seattle, Yoffee was released. According to Justus, the suspect’s appearance did not, in fact, jibe with the strangler’s. “The man arrested at Eugene has light, watery eyes and is slender,” Justus explained to reporters on Tuesday morning. “The man we think killed Mrs. Monks had dark, penetrating eyes and was of a husky build.”

Two days later, papers trumpeted the arrest of another suspect, a thirty-one-year-old Nebraskan named James Ford, who strolled into Seattle police headquarters early Thursday morning and announced that he was the “beast man” who had slain Mrs. Monks. As the police began questioning Ford, however, it quickly became clear that he was ignorant of the most basic facts about the case. Ford—who eventually admitted that his imagination had been overly stimulated by a combination of bootleg liquor and the gruesome crime stories he had been reading in
Thrilling Detective
magazine—was deemed “mentally unbalanced” and held for a sanity hearing.

The media attention given to such a flagrant crank as Ford was a sign of how little of real substance there was to report about the case. As the Myers investigation entered its second week, the killer’s trail had grown completely cold. Though police were now armed with a detailed description of the “beast man’s” appearance, mannerisms, and m.o., he continued to elude them.

Speaking to reporters on Friday morning, December 11, Chief of Detectives Charles Tennant of Portland couldn’t conceal his frustration. “It’s uncanny the way this killer operates,” Tennant declared.

Indeed, Tennant was so discouraged over the state of the investigation that he made what amounted to a complete admission of defeat. In a front-page story headlined POLICE FEAR “
DARK KILLER
”
WILL RETURN
, an anonymous reporter for the
Seattle Daily Times
who had attended Tennant’s Friday-morning
press conference wrote: “So baffling have been the murders, so cunningly has their perpetrator covered up his tracks that Tennant confessed yesterday that his greatest concern was that another woman would be found mysteriously slain here.”