Bestial (27 page)

According to her divorce papers, Dr. Atorthy had severely mistreated his wife—beating her routinely, refusing her money for food, and subjecting her to various forms of public humiliation. “After our marriage,” she had deposed, “I found that Dr. Atorthy had married me for spite. He had been going with another girl for four years and when she
jilted him, he married me. I now realize that he never loved me.

“Dr. Atorthy forced me to carry fifty-pound blocks of ice up two flights of stairs and made me split big chunks of coal for the furnace. He seemed to despise me and made his patients think I was the scrub woman.”

For his part, Dr. Atorthy had charged that his wife was both an alcoholic and a drug addict who had stolen narcotics from his office. Later investigation into the life of Mrs. Atorthy, née Oswald, revealed that, while serving with the Women’s Auxiliary Army during the Great War, she had been wounded at Vimy Ridge and had indeed become addicted to morphine.

Following the breakup of her marriage in February 1927, she had taken a room at 640 Philadelphia Avenue West, a boardinghouse owned by an absentee landlord named Leonard Sink and managed by a fifty-three-year-old widow, Mrs. Fannie C. May. On the first day of June, Sink came by to collect the rent, but no one appeared to be home. He tried again on the following afternoon. This time, he rang the bell and knocked on the door for nearly five minutes before giving up. When he failed to get a response for the third consecutive day, he became alarmed, particularly since there was a growing pile of mail and newspapers on the front porch.

Proceeding to the Bethune police station, Sink identified himself as the owner of the house and told the desk sergeant that he “believed the occupants were in some sort of difficulty.” Two officers, Patrolmen Roy Tatton and Ralph Morton, accompanied him back to the house. After trying the doorbell with no success, the three men entered with Sink’s passkey.

They found Mrs. May first. She was lying facedown on the tiled floor of the upstairs bedroom, her white cotton housedress bunched above her hips, an electric cord knotted around her neck.

Mrs. Atorthy’s corpse was stretched out on the floor of the adjacent bedroom. She had been garrotted with a length of black ribbon. The front of her blouse had been ripped open, and her brown cotton skirt pulled up to her waist. Her topcoat and hat were lying on the floor. From the way the two victims were dressed—the landlady in houseclothes,
her tenant in street attire—the officers surmised that the killer had found Mrs. May alone, attacked her, then awaited the return of Mrs. Atorthy. As the
Detroit News
reported, “A ‘Rooms for Rent’ sign had been placed in the front door of the house, and it would have been easy for a stranger to have gained entrance without exciting Mrs. May’s suspicion.”

The bedrooms had been ransacked, the contents of the bureau drawers spilled onto the floors. After learning about Mrs. Atorthy’s background, the police surmised that she had been killed by one of her unsavory acquaintances, a “dope fiend” who had come to the house to steal her supply of drugs and had slain both women to prevent them from identifying him.

On Thursday, June 2, two narcotics addicts well-known to police, Charles Washington of 1943 Wilkins Street and Jacques Helberg of 567 Napoleon Street, were brought in for questioning. Both men, however, were able to account for their whereabouts at the time of the murders. Nor did either of them conform to the description of a mysterious visitor glimpsed by one of Mrs. May’s neighbors, Gloria Hopkins, on the day of the slayings.

Mrs. Hopkins had been hanging out her laundry on Wednesday afternoon when she noticed “a man of medium build and dark complexion” ringing her neighbor’s bell. A few moments later, Mrs. May came to the door and, after exchanging a few words with the stranger, admitted him to the house. “That was the last I ever saw of her,” Mrs. Hopkins told the police.

Several more days went by before Detroit homicide detectives began to entertain a different theory—that the “dark-complexioned” caller seen by Mrs. Hopkins was the “Pacific Coast Bluebeard” who had recently shifted his operations to the East. By the time they came to this realization, however, the strangler was already heading westward again.

On Friday, June 4, he killed a twenty-seven-year-old landlady named Mary Cecilia Sietsema in the living room of her home at 7501 South Sangamon Street, Chicago. At first, two suspects were arrested—Michael Hirsch, a butcher known to have made a delivery to the victim on the day of the murder, and a car mechanic named Jack Grimm, who worked in a garage a short distance from the Sietsema home.
As the
Chicago Tribune
reported, “Suspicion was cast upon Grimm when it was learned that he disappeared from work Friday afternoon and failed to return home that night.”

Both Hirsch and Grimm would quickly be cleared. Hirsch, who had fallen under suspicion partly because of some blood on his shoes, was able to prove that it had come from a wound he had sustained while opening a tub of butter in his father’s shop. And Grimm’s claim that “he had been out getting drunk” at the time of the murder was substantiated by a number of witnesses. The men were released from the Cook County jail on Monday, June 6, while the real perpetrator was moving up into northern Minnesota.

Since the previous February, he had slain twenty victims: nineteen women and one infant boy. Detectives in a dozen different cities, from San Francisco to Philadelphia, were hunting him. Though he had so far managed to elude capture—through a combination of cunning, luck, and the still-primitive state of American police work—the country was becoming a risky place for him.

And so—sometime on the morning of June 8, 1927—Earle Leonard Nelson crossed the border into Canada.

†

Conrad Aiken, “And in the Human Heart”

For brief as water falling will be death …
brief as the taking, and giving, breath.

By the time he reached Winnipeg, he was tired, hungry, and desperate for cash. He had gotten a lift early that morning from a man named Chandler, who had picked him up near Warren, Minnesota, and driven him as far as Noyes, in the northwest corner of the state. From there he had made his way into Manitoba. Just outside Emerson, he had hitched a ride from another motorist, John T. Hanna, who had dropped him off in Winnipeg at around 1:15
P.M
.

He spent one of his few remaining nickels on a trolley ride to Main Street, then trudged along the sidewalk until he spotted what he was looking for, a dingy little shop that peddled secondhand clothes.

The store smelled of mildew and was lit by a single bare bulb. It was so gloomy inside that it took him a moment to locate the proprietor, a balding old man named Jake Garber, who was perched on a stool behind the rear counter.

With barely a nod of hello, he launched into his story. He had just arrived from the country and was flat broke. He planned to look for a construction job in the morning but in the meantime needed some cash to pay for a room.

“Tell you what,” he said to the old man. “These clothes are too fancy anyways.” Here he gestured toward his outfit-red-striped
sweater, blue woolen pants, gray felt cap, and tan loafers. “I’ll trade them for anything you got, plus a dollar.”

Garber appraised the clothes for a moment. Then, with a grudging sigh, as though he were granting an enormous favor, he eased himself off the stool and shuffled around the counter. After rooting around on his shelves for a few minutes, he returned with an armful of musty old clothes, which he laid on the counter. The dark-complexioned stranger changed hurriedly while Garber made his way to the cash register and removed a dollar.

Pocketing the money, the stranger hurried out of the store without another word. Dressed in the secondhand clothing—shabby blue coat with missing buttons, baggy brown trousers, floppy gray hat, and oversized black boots—he looked about as ragged as he felt. He needed to find a house to hole up in, and it had to be his kind of place: cheap, out-of-the-way, and—ideally—run by a nice, defenseless landlady.

From the outside at least, the big wooden house at 133 Smith Street, with its weatherbeaten air and “Rooms for Rent” sign in the window, appeared to be just what he was looking for. He mounted the veranda and pressed the door buzzer. The time was just before 5:00
P.M.
, Wednesday, June 8, 1927.

The door was opened by a stout, white-haired woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Hill. He gave his name as “Woodcoats” and said that he was looking for a “quiet room in a quiet house.”

“My house is quiet,” Mrs. Hill replied, a note of indignation in her voice. “I don’t allow any drinking on the premises. And if you’re looking to bring any girls into your room, you’d better go elsewhere.”

“Good,” said the young, dark-complexioned man. “All I want is quiet surroundings. I don’t like to be bothered while I’m studying my Bible.”

Mrs. Hill was impressed. “So you’re a religious person, are you?”

“Always have been,” the stranger said. “A man with Christ in his heart has nothing in this life to worry about.”

Though she’d been a little put off by his uncouth appearance,
Mrs. Hill liked what she heard. Inviting him inside, she led him upstairs to the second floor and ushered him into the vacant room.

It was clean and simply furnished and suited his needs just fine. But the price, twelve dollars per month, was a little steeper than he’d hoped.

When he asked if she had anything cheaper, she explained that, yes, there was another, smaller room that rented for ten dollars a month. It was currently occupied by a young dry-goods salesman, but he would be gone in a week, at which point Mr. Woodcoats could have it.

“All right,” said the man who called himself Woodcoats. In the meantime, he would remain in the costlier room and pay her one week’s rent in advance, three dollars.

“Trouble is,” he said, looking somewhat abashed, “I’m down to my last dollar.” He was working on a construction job just across the river in St. Boniface and expected to get paid the next day. Could he give her a dollar now and the balance tomorrow—maybe Friday at the latest?

“That will be fine,” said the landlady, taking the preferred bill and slipping it into her apron pocket.

The young man was in a talkative mood, so Mrs. Hill, who always liked to learn something about her guests, settled herself on the edge of his bed and had a chat. She remained there for another twenty minutes or so, ample time to make a close inspection of the young man. His black hair, dark eyes, and swarthy skin led her to believe he was of foreign extraction, possibly Greek or Italian. He was dressed like a laborer—mud-encrusted boots, frayed serge coat, cheap cottonade trousers. He was clearly destitute, bereft of everything but the clothes on his back. He carried no luggage at all, not even a small travelling bag.

Still, though he cut an unprepossessing figure, he struck her as a young man of character—“high ideals,” as she later put it. They talked mainly about religion. He was a Roman Catholic, he said, and liked to spend part of each day studying Scripture. At another point, by way of explaining his straitened circumstances, he told her that, until recently, he had done a thriving business in construction but had been driven into bankruptcy by an unscrupulous partner.

Mrs. Hill clucked her tongue. “Ah, well. A young man like you is better off on your own anyways.”

It was almost six by the tune she got up to leave. Pausing at the door, she repeated the house rules. “Now mind. No liquor in the room. And no girls.”

“No need to worry,” he said, smiling. “I’m a straightforward and good-living man who never wants to do wrong by anyone.”

He stayed shut up in his room until after dark, when he wandered onto the veranda. He found another lodger, James Phillips, seated outside, enjoying the night air. Like Mrs. Hill, Phillips took the new arrival for an Italian laborer, a “Dago bricklayer,” as he would later tell the police. The two men made inconsequential talk for a while, mostly about the weather. Then, explaining that he was “dog-tired” from a long day of travelling, “Woodcoats” wished Phillips good night and repaired to his room.

No one saw him again until teatime the next day, Thursday, June 9. Mrs. Hill was seated at the kitchen table with her husband, John, when the new lodger appeared at the doorway. Seeing the couple together, the burly young man did a little double take, as though he had expected to find the old lady alone.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, stammering slightly. After an embarrassed pause, he explained that he still did not have the two dollars he owed her but expected to have it by Friday. Mrs. Hill assured him that Friday would be “just fine.” Muttering a thanks, he turned on his heels, made for the front door, and headed outside for a prowl.

Lola Cowan was still a few days shy of her fourteenth birthday, which would fall on Sunday, June 12. But with her bobbed hair, shapely legs, and woman’s body, she could have passed for twenty.

She still acted like a child, though. On the afternoon of Thursday, June 9, at roughly the tune that Earle Leonard Nelson was leaving the Hill house, she lingered in the playground of the Mulvey school to play baseball with some of her fifth-grade schoolmates, a group that included her friends Chrissie Budge, Peggy Robertson, Florence Reid, Douglas Palk, George Little, James and Billy Clement, Arthur
Hermans, and Edgar Betson. It was nearly 5:00
P.M.
when she scooped up her schoolbooks and headed home. None of her friends would see her alive again.

The Cowan family—mother, father, and four children ranging in age from five to seventeen—shared a little bungalow at 3 University Place. (Another child, the oldest—twenty-five-year-old Archie Cowan—lived in the Manitoba mining area.) Several weeks earlier, Mr. Cowan, a salesman, had been stricken with pneumonia. After a slow recuperation, he was finally getting back on his feet, though he was still too debilitated for work.

With her husband unemployed and the family savings dwindling at an alarming rate, Mrs. Cowan had taken a menial job at the St. Regis Hotel. Lola had also resolved to do what she could. For the past few weeks, she had been going out in the evening to sell the artificial sweet peas that her older sister, Margaret, fashioned out of colored paper.