Read Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of Online
Authors: Harold Schechter
Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (29 page)
His most sensational admission, however, was that he had slain little John and Isabella Joyce in Lynn, Massachusetts. Though some law officers involved in the case were skeptical of his claim—and though Franklin himself retracted it shortly before his death—the similarities between the Lovering outrage and the murders in Bussey’s woods convinced most observers that the crimes had indeed been perpetrated by the same “inhuman wretch.” Headlines around the country trumpeted the news that the eight-year-old Joyce mystery had finally been solved.
F
RANKLIN
E
VANS PASSED
the last night of his life quietly, falling asleep around midnight with his spiritual advisor, the Rev. Mr. Church of Providence, Rhode Island, at his side. Awakening around 5:30 a.m., he ate a hearty breakfast and drank a mug of hot tea. “I have confessed everything,” he replied when Church asked if he had any last-minute statements to make. “If the people don’t believe it, I can’t help it.”
Outside the prison walls, a large, excited crowd had gathered. At 10:50 a.m., they were admitted into the building, where the gallows had been set up in the corridor between the guardroom and the cells. Within minutes, every available inch of space was packed with spectators, some positioning themselves on the stairways leading up to the cells, others crowding around the scaffold.
At eleven o’clock, Evans, dressed in a black suit, was led through the crowd by Warden Pittsburg. Mounting the scaffold, he muttered something inaudible under his breath while his arms and legs were pinioned. He appeared “quite calm and possessed,” though the people standing closest to the scaffold observed that his knees were trembling slightly. The noose was carefully adjusted around his neck and the black hood pulled down over his head. After reading the death warrant, Sheriff Odlin placed his foot on the spring of the drop and—at precisely 11:06 a.m., Tuesday, February 17, 1874—the sixty-seven-year-old serial murderer “was launched into eternity.”
He dangled for nearly twenty minutes before his heart stopped beating and the attending physician declared him dead. In view of his outrageous claim that he had mutilated his victims to gain anatomical knowledge that would “aid him as a doctor,” the final disposition of his own corpse couldn’t have been more fitting. It was transported to Dartmouth Medical College for dissection by students.
Franklin Evans was still awaiting trial when a local poetaster named Byron DeWolfe composed and printed a broadside ballad about the sex slaying of Georgianna Lovering. Unlike the typical “murdered-girl ballad,” which tends to play fast and loose with the facts, DeWolfe’s piece, despite its thick coating of sentimentality, offers an almost journalistic account of the crime. Consisting of more than two dozen eight-line stanzas, it is too long to reprint here in its entirety, though the following excerpt offers a good sense of the whole. Interested readers can find an image of the original broadside by going to “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera” on the Library of Congress’ “American Memory” website:
memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/
.
Dark were the eyes of a beautiful maiden,
Like music her voice, and her cheeks were in bloom;
Her mind seemed to be with the purest thoughts laden;
Her breath was as sweet as the rose’s perfume;
Her mother worked hard for her child’s education,
And brought for her many a well-written tome;
Her father had died for the flag of his Nation;
And she was the sunlight and comfort of home!
She with her grandparents and mother resided;
Two miles from the Centre of Northwood the cot;
The villagers loved her and in her confided;
And girls near her age her companionship sought;
She was her mother’s one, chief earthly treasure;
Oft her sweet voice had the weeping one cheered;
Sorrow itself seemed to turn into pleasure,
And grief unto gladness where Georgie appeared!
She had an uncle too deep steeped in error
To learn in her presence the way to improve;
His sinister look would fill children with terror;
Few hearts could towards him affectionate move;
He looked sanctimonious for certain occasions,
And words big with honor came to him at ease,
Yet he was her uncle, and she must have patience,
And do all she could to relieve him and please.
True, his mean soul she was quick to discover,
Yet knew not how fiendish her uncle could be,
The angels of love seemed about her to hover;
A word was unkind for no mortal had she;
So when he told her he’d work on the morrow,
And asked her if she’d to his bird-snares attend?
“O, yes!” she replied, though she told him in sorrow,
As if she was dreading some terrible end.
The next morn arrived, a bright day in October,
The maiden was up to look after the snares,
And grandmother saw that young Georgie looked sober,
As if she was weary of earth and its cares!
“O, what is the matter my darling, this morning?
What makes you look sad, when so often you’re gay?
Have you had a terrible dream or a warning?
O, what has come over you, pretty one, say?”
“Granny, to uncle last night I was telling
I’d go to the wild woods his bird-snares to see,
But somehow I dread to leave your homely dwelling,
For horrible thoughts really linger with me;
Oft to me did those old woods look delightful;
I oft liked to go at the bird-snares to look;
But now, despite sunshine, the forest looks frightful,
And lately with joy I’ve no trip in it took!”
Old granny, no doubt, thought the girl superstitious,
And having no reason for trouble or fear,
And Georgie gave her a sweet kiss and delicious,
Then these were the words the old lady did hear,
“I promised my uncle his snares I’d attend to;
This morning I’ll go and I’ll look them all o’er,
But when I’ve done that, O such work there’s an end to,
I’ll go in the woods for my uncle no more!”
The uncle went not to his labor that morning!
His thoughts were all evil, his ways all defiled,
Religion—truth—honor—humanity scorning,
He stands on the hill-top—he watches the child!
He comes down the hill! In the forest does enter!
The watcher knows not on what mission he’s bound,
But soon the news spreads from the cot to the Centre,
How young Georgie Lovering can nowhere be found!
In the wild wood had her grandfather sought her,
Though “Georgie” he called, he received no reply;
The mother, too, searched for her beautiful daughter,
Until she was ready with anguish to die;
How wildly—how deeply her mother lamented,
And said, “Tell me, Georgie, where you roam!”
No wonder the woman was almost demented,
When she found the apron, and with it her comb!
Yes, there was the comb, it had Georgie’s hair in it,
The sight seemed to prove that her earth-life had fled;
The searchers with horror did stand for a minute,
And each of them feared Georgie Lovering was dead;
Continue the search—get more men from the Centre—
We must know her fate, and the end we must see.
And farther and farther the forest we’ll enter,
No sleep will we crave, and unwearied we’ll be.
And when Sheriff Drew at last forced the confession
From Evans, the uncle a fiend among men,
That he had done wrong, and great was his transgression,
That search was abandoned; but not until then!
Abandoned! but ’twas for the sake of another,
To be in the night—in the darkness intense;
For one that would bring a dead child to its mother,
But for a lost idol make small recompense.
With lantern in hand went the Sheriff with Evans;
The wind in the forest did dismally moan;
No bright moon or star could be seen in the heavens;
Around all was darkness—and darkness alone,
Save the small light by the lantern was given;
And on went the Sheriff, his eye on the wretch,
Who, if caught by a crowd could no prayer-time be having;
His form from the nearest stout tree-branch would stretch!
“Lead!” said the Sheriff. “I lead!” said the trembler;
He led; for he knew not what else he could do,
He’d been a deceiver—a murderer—dissembler—
And somehow he was in the power of Drew!
He led to a swamp where the bog-holes looked fearful!
He left it—returned—reached a desolate spot
Which even the sunshine could never make cheerful,
And midnight upon it great loneliness wrought.
There the fiend stooped, ay, he almost was kneeling,
He scraped away leaves and
THERE WAS SOMETHING WHITE
!
The Sheriff the form of the dead girl was feeling!
Feeling it there on that terrible night!
Feeling it there with her murderer near him,
And standing as calm as a man at his gate,
Feeling it there! Was he wild? Was he dreaming?
He thought even this was a terrible fate.
Assistance was near, for that had been provided;
Men came to the spot just as quick as they could;
The prisoner, surely, by that time decided
That nothing about was foreboding him good;
There lay the form of the girl he had strangled,
And probably dragged to that horrible spot;
There lay the body, all lifeless and mangled,
Ah, never a tiger such bad work had wrought.
The 1865 slaying of the Joyce children, ultimately confessed to by Franklin Evans, inspired what has to be one of the weirdest true crime books ever published, Henry Johnson Brent’s
Was It a Ghost? The Murders in Bussey Wood. An Extraordinary Narrative
(Boston: Loring, 1868).
A well-known landscape painter and founding editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, the preeminent literary journal of its day, Brent was vacationing (“rusticating,” he puts it) at the country home of a friend only a short distance from the crime scene at the time the murders took place.
Three weeks after the discovery of the two butchered children, he was out for an evening stroll in the forest when—so he claims—a strange “misty figure” appeared before him. “He looked dark gray from head to foot,” Brent writes. “Body he had, and legs, and arms, and a head; but the face I could not distinctly see.” This weird apparition stood frozen for a moment, then—“as quick as the flash of gunpowder”—vanished into thin air, leaving Brent convinced that he had seen a ghost, possibly of the unknown murderer himself.
The book then alternates between a detailed re-creation of the double murder and an argument for the existence of ghosts. The result is a bizarre hybrid—part true crime book, part meditation on spiritualistic phenomena—that drew widespread scorn from contemporary critics. “We are disposed to consider this a very unsubstantial pretext for making a book,” sniffed one reviewer. “What good it accomplishes, what end it serves, it is impossible to discover. It does not help the identification of the murderer. It throws no light on any of the supernatural speculations so prevalent in these days. The curious public will probably hang with fresh interest on the horrible details of the crime. But no one, so far as we can see, will be benefited by its perusal.”
[
Sources: Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 2009); The Northwood Murder: A Complete Report of the Trial of Franklin B. Evans for the Murder of Georgianna Lovering at Northwood, October 25, 1872, Together with a Portrait and Sketch of the Career of the Murderer (Manchester, NH, 1873).
]
“THE FRENCH MONSTER”
L
ESS THAN TWO YEARS AFTER FRANKLIN EVANS WAS HANGED FOR THE SEX
murder of thirteen-year-old Georgianna Lovering, another shockingly similar crime occurred in New Hampshire. Its perpetrator was a French Canadian woodcutter named Joseph Lapage. Like Evans, Lapage was a classic lust killer—the type of extreme sexual psychopath who attacks with the ferocity of a wild beast, subjecting his victim’s body to unspeakable mutilations. His contemporaries described him in less clinical terms. To them, he was a creature of infernal evil: a “fiend incarnate,” a “demon from the bottomless pit.”
