Bestial (25 page)

Precisely twenty-four hours after the discovery of Bonnie Pace’s corpse—at 2:00
P.M.
, Tuesday, December 28—a Kansas City man named Marius Harpin returned to his house at 2330 Mercier Street and found both his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Germania, and their eight-month-old son, Robert, dead. The killer had strangled both victims with his bare hands.

Later, police learned that a family friend, J. F. Grofils, had dropped by the house at around noon and been unable to arouse anyone inside, though he had rung the doorbell repeatedly. Grofils had noticed two full milk bottles standing on the front stoop. Since the milkman made his daily delivery
to the Harpin home at around 10:00
A.M.
, the killings had evidently occurred between that hour and twelve.

Over the next few days, the police received the usual torrent of worthless tips, many of them from disgruntled callers, pointing accusatory fingers at their own neighbors, co-workers, and relatives. A string of suspects was brought in for questioning, then promptly released after supplying plausible alibis.

At one point Chief of Detectives L. R. Toyne, who had already issued a “dead or alive” directive to his underlings, took a call from a husky-voiced man who declared, “I killed those people, and I may kill myself.” Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, the chief whispered urgently to the nearest officer, “Trace this call!” Then Toyne got back on the line, hoping to keep the man talking. Suddenly, however, the voice let out a low chortle. “Boy, I’m nutty!” the caller declared before slamming down the receiver in the chief’s ear.

New Year’s Day saw the Kansas City police no closer to a solution. By then, several of Toyne’s men, aware of the recent homicide up in Council Bluffs, were certain that they, too, were dealing with the infamous “Dark Strangler.” It wasn’t simply that all three Kansas City victims had been choked to death. There were other circumstances linking the murders to the strangler.

While searching the latest crime scene, for example, investigators had found a cigarette butt on the bathroom floor, although neither Marius Harpin nor his wife was a smoker. On the other hand (as authorities knew from the accounts of Edna Gaylord and Susan Yates, the elderly Portland women who had played host to “Adrian Harris” for several days) the strangler suspect
was
a smoker.

More significantly, both the Harpins and the Paces supplemented their incomes by taking in boarders and had hand-lettered “Rooms for Rent” cards displayed in their front-parlor windows.

Of course, the Harpin case
did
differ in one essential respect from the earlier crimes. Up to that point, all the victims had been landladies. Little Robert Harpin was the first child to die at the strangler’s hands. He wouldn’t be the last.

†

Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics

A bad man can do a million times more harm than a beast.

T
he day after Bonnie Pace was slain, one of her neighbors, an elderly man named C. C. Buck, telephoned the central station of the Kansas City police. Buck reported that, at around ten o’clock on the morning of December 27, the approximate time of the murder, he had glanced out his bedroom window and seen a Ford coupe pull up in front of the Pace residence. A squat man had emerged from the car, mounted the front steps, and, after ringing the doorbell and exchanging a few words with Mrs. Pace, been admitted to the house.

The stranger had been facing away from Buck, so the old man didn’t get a good look at him. Nor did Buck remember much about the car, beyond its dilapidated condition. Still, his information confirmed the police’s growing conviction that Mrs. Pace’s killer was the Pacific Coast strangler, who, on at least one prior occasion, had been spotted fleeing from a crime scene in a beaten-up Ford.

By 1927, Henry Ford’s creation was transforming the very character of American life and, in the view of many people, not always for the better. The wayward morality of the country’s “flaming youth” was blamed, at least in part, on their easy access to enclosed automobiles, which one outraged critic described as “bordellos on wheels.”

Cars were also accused of contributing to the frightening rise in violent crime. In his 1927 magazine article, “What Makes Criminals,” George W. Kirchwey, former warden of Sing Sing and Dean of Columbia Law School, observed that the “high-powered motor car, which has given us ‘necking’ in place of the old-fashioned ‘sparking,’ has also given us the bandit, with his automatic gun and easy getaway, in place of the old-time footpad.”

But cars were conducive to more than motorized banditry and adolescent sex. In America, the advent of the modern serial killer coincided absolutely with the coming of the automobile. Before the 1920s, the closest thing our country had to a serial murderer was the nineteenth-century “arch-fiend,” Dr. H. H. Holmes. But though Holmes led a peripatetic life, his atrocities were largely committed in a single locale, his brooding “Murder Castle” in a suburb of Chicago.

By contrast, the “Dark Strangler” preyed on victims from coast to coast, presaging the enormities of such nomadic monsters as Henry Lee Lucas and Ted Bundy, who were able to get away with dozens of murders by keeping constantly on the move. In this, as in other respects, the strangler was a true evil prototype, the first American serial killer of the modern era.

Sometime in the early spring, he reached the East Coast, where, on Wednesday, April 27, he killed his sixteenth victim.

Mrs. Anna Keichline, an elderly invalid who lived alone at 1935 South Sixtieth Street in West Philadelphia, had spent the afternoon seated by an open front window, savoring the sweetness of the day. At approximately 2:45
P.M.
, she saw a strange man approach the house of her next-door neighbor, a fifty-three-year-old widow named Mary McConnell. Mrs. Keichline assumed that the man was there to inquire about the house, which had been on the market for nearly a year. The wooden “For Sale” sign standing on the front lawn was so weatherbeaten by now that the painted words were barely legible.

About a half-hour later, Mrs. Keichline saw the man stroll out of her neighbor’s front door. This time, the elderly woman took a closer look at him. As she would later tell the police, he was a “dark-skinned white man, maybe Greek
or Italian, about thirty-five or forty years old, with a chunky build. He was wearing a gray soft hat and a shabby gray coat, a little too big for him.” One particular detail caught her eye, a sticky white substance that looked like paperhanger’s paste smeared on the front of his droopy gray overcoat.

It was only a few minutes later that Mary McConnell’s corpse was discovered. Her son-in-law, John Donovan, who was helping her re-paper an upstairs bedroom, dropped by around 3:30
P.M.
to finish the task.

As soon as the young man stepped into the room, he saw the signs of disturbance—an overturned table, a shattered lamp. The paste bucket had been knocked over, and its contents lay puddled on the floor.

He found his mother-in-law’s body stuffed under the bed. She had been strangled with a woolen dust rag, knotted so tightly around her throat that Donovan couldn’t undo it with his fingers and had to cut it off with scissors. Stuffed deep inside the victim’s mouth was an old cotton sock.

It took only a few minutes for Detectives Rogers and O’Kane of the Woodland Avenue station to respond to Donovan’s frantic call for help. After examining the murder scene and interviewing Anna Keichline, the investigators concluded that the crime was the work of the Pacific Coast strangler, whose description, by that point, was known to every major police department in the country.

Over the next few days, virtually every officer on the Philadelphia force hunted for the killer. One suspect, a thoroughly bewildered Mexican laborer named Pedro Garcia, who lived on Twelfth and Sixtieth streets, was picked up and questioned for no other reason than his rough physical resemblance to the strangler. Meanwhile, the switchboard of the central police station was flooded with the usual rash of strangler sightings. At least two dozen housewives called in to report that their homes had been invaded by dark, sinister men while their husbands were away at work.

One of the few apparently authentic reports came from a woman named Foy. On Thursday, April 28, Mrs. Foy was hanging out her wash when she saw a “swarthy-looking stranger” ringing the bell of the next-door house, at 5583 Locust Street. The house, owned by a widow named Sophie Freeman, had a “For Sale” sign displayed in its front window.
Mrs. Freeman, however, was away for the week, vacationing in Atlantic City with her son, Franklin.

“There’s no one home,” Mrs. Foy called out to the man.

The man, who wore a gray hat and oversized gray coat, looked over at Mrs. Foy, then turned his attention to her house, which was identical in design to Mrs. Freeman’s.

“Your place laid out inside the same as this one?” he called out to her.

Mrs. Foy confirmed that it was.

“Can I come over and have a look?” asked the man, smiling pleasantly. Mrs. Foy was struck by how white his front teeth looked in contrast to his olive skin.

Suddenly, she felt her insides go cold. She had read that morning’s
Inquirer
, which had run a front-page story about the “throttling fiend” along with a warning to all Philadelphia housewives from Police Captain McMichael of the Woodland station.

“No,” said Mrs. Foy. “You may not.” But the man was already headed in her direction. Suddenly, when he was just a few yards away, he came at her with a lunge.

Letting out a scream, Mrs. Foy turned and bolted into her house, slamming the door behind her. Her screams roused her husband, John, a police officer attached to the Fifty-fifth and Pine Streets station, who had just gotten home from his shift and was upstairs in their bedroom. By the time Foy got hold of his gun and rushed downstairs, however, the stranger had fled.

Meanwhile, the murder victim’s husband, William McConnell, had learned of his wife’s death in a particularly painful way. A travelling salesman, he had just arrived in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on the day of the murder. The following morning, he came down to the hotel dining room, stopping off first at the front desk for a copy of the local newspaper. Seating himself at the table, he unfolded the paper. The first thing that caught his eye was a front-page headline:
PHILADELPHIA WOMAN FOUND STRANGLED IN HOME
. Then he read the story.

Stunned and disbelieving, McConnell ran to a telephone and called his son-in-law, who confirmed the terrible news. Within the hour, McConnell was on a train back to Philadelphia. He was so overcome with grief by the time he arrived
that he could not bring himself to view his wife’s body at the morgue.

By then, Captain McMichael had received reports that the strangler had been spotted travelling along the Baltimore pike. A squad of homicide detectives was immediately dispatched to Delaware County. But on Monday, May 2, the weary captain conceded defeat. Meeting with reporters, he praised the efforts of his men, who had been devoting “every waking hour to the pursuit.” But in spite of their exertions, they had lost the strangler’s scent. As the
Inquirer
reported on Tuesday, May 3, “the suspect’s identity and whereabouts” were “still as much of a mystery to police as when they started to search for him.”

†

Gideon Gillett

She would not move from this home. She always said she would live here forever.

B
y the time the strangler struck again, Charles A. Lindbergh had made his epochal transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. Indeed, the momentous exploit of the heroic “Lone Eagle” was still dominating the headlines when the killer claimed his seventeenth victim, Mrs. Jennie Randolph of Buffalo, New York.

To her family and friends, the fifty-three-year-old widow was a loving, almost saintly, woman. She and her only child, Orville, had moved into a two-story house at 175 Plymouth Avenue eighteen years earlier, after the death of her husband, Earl. Six years later, in 1915, Orville—a bright, handsome teenager who had just graduated from the Normal public school—died during an operation to remove a ruptured appendix.

The loss of her son was such a devastating blow to Jennie Randolph that her loved ones feared she might suffer a complete emotional collapse. After weeks of anguished mourning, however, she managed to wrest herself from the grip of despair and discover a new purpose in life, plunging into church work and dedicating herself to the welfare of others.

The primary outlet for her philanthropy was the Cradle
Roll program of the Plymouth Methodist Episcopal Church. Each week, along with other members of the church, Mrs. Randolph would equip herself with a bagful of baby clothes and, venturing into the city’s poorest slums, distribute the garments to needy young mothers. Once a year, the program also sponsored a “cradle party” at the church, to which all the new mothers of the neighborhood were invited.

To make ends meet, Mrs. Randolph worked as a parttime waitress in the YMCA restaurant. At the same time, she had begun taking in tenants, who provided her not only with a supplementary income but also with another outlet for the maternal care she could no longer lavish on her child. One of these was her own older brother, Gideon Gillett, himself a widower, who had occupied a room in his sister’s house for nearly ten years. Another was twenty-two-year-old Fred Merritt, a night watchman in a Delaware Avenue apartment building. Merritt, an orphan, had been living in the house for so long—over three years—that Mrs. Randolph had come to regard him as a surrogate son.

In May 1927 there were two other roomers staying in the house, a short-order cook named Michael Malloy and James Bottinger, a carpenter. That left two available rooms, both recently vacated by travelling salesmen. To advertise them, Mrs. Randolph had placed a “Rooms to Let” sign in a living-room window facing Plymouth Avenue. She had spent the better part of Thursday morning, May 26, putting the rooms in trim—dusting, mopping, making up the beds with freshly laundered sheets and clean white counterpanes. She had even hung new chintz curtains on the windows.