Bestial (10 page)

By way of comparison, Kirchwey described the treatment of one of the key pieces of evidence in the Sacco-Vanzetti case—a cap, allegedly belonging to Nicola Sacco, found at the murder scene in South Braintree, Massachusetts. “Upon the identification of its wearer hung an issue of nation-wide concern,” Kirchwey observed. And how did the Braintree police handle it? Chief Jerome Gallivan stuck the cap under the front seat of his automobile, where it lay for nearly two weeks, then ripped open the lining with his bare hands in the hope of finding some kind of identification mark.

If there was one bright spot in this dismal picture of Keystone Kops forensics, it could be found in California, which boasted the nation’s oldest State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation. Established in 1917, this centralized agency kept voluminous files—including fingerprints, mug shots, physical descriptions, and arrest records—on thousands of criminals. In addition, it maintained a highly trained staff of specialists in microscopy, handwriting, chemistry, photography, ballistics, fingerprinting, etc. In every area, the bureau had proven its worth. In 1927, for example, maintenance of the bureau cost the taxpayers $37,776, as against $1,253,205 of stolen property recovered and returned to its rightful owners.

Its success in dealing with “migratory criminals,” felons who eluded the law by moving from city to city and state to state, had been especially striking. During the first decade of its existence, more than 7,000 men picked up on minor charges by various small-town police departments had been identified by the bureau as fugitives from other states—murderers,
escaped convicts, bank robbers, and bunko men—and returned for imprisonment.

Writing in the monthly magazine
Current History
, Superintendent C. S. Morrill gave a vivid illustration of his bureau’s achievements. On the evening of July 29, 1926, while magician Charles Joseph Carter—known as “Carter the Great”—was mystifying a San Francisco audience with his world-famous vanishing act, $14,000 worth of jewelry vanished from his apartment. Within forty-eight hours, the State Criminal Identification Bureau had ascertained that the stolen jewelry was being peddled in Nevada. Travelling to Nevada, city detectives were able to recover most of the loot and arrest four “well-known migratory criminals,” the burglar and three accomplices.

“The recovery of the jewels and apprehension of the criminals were possible because California has broken down the barrier of isolation that surrounds the police of many states,” Morrill wrote with quiet pride. “California’s centralized crime bureau reaches out from city to city and state to state to gather information for her otherwise isolated police units and to coordinate their efforts in apprehending migratory criminals.”

Ironically, at the very moment that the California crime bureau was helping to crack the Carter jewelry heist, it was faced with another, far more frightening case involving a “migratory criminal.” Already, he had thrown several cities into a panic. Assisted by the bureau, police throughout the state were doing everything possible to identify this shadowy figure. Their failure would make Superintendent Morrill’s boasts about California’s system seem painfully hollow, though the bureau’s forensic experts couldn’t really be blamed.

When it came to burglars, robbers, check forgers, even run-of-the-mill murderers, the bureau had an impressive record of success. But the crimes that commenced in early 1926 represented a phenomenon so unparalled that, even in the nation that Morrill called “the most crime-infested society on earth,” nothing quite like them had ever been seen.

†

Francis Quarles, “Emblems”

This house is to be let for life or years; Her rent is sorrow, and her income tears.

S
ixty-year-old Clara Newman was a person of means, a shrewd, tough-minded woman who had managed to turn a small inheritance into a considerable fortune by her canny investments in real estate. In 1926, she owned property in several states, including two houses in San Francisco and a big spread in Pennsylvania.

From her manner of living, a stranger would never have guessed at her wealth. Parsimonious by nature, the “aged spinster” (as the newspapers would soon be describing her) dressed simply, subsisted on a meager diet, and inhabited a few sparsely furnished rooms on the ground floor of her house at 2037 Pierce Street. Though her mind was keen as ever, Miss Newman was physically frail and required help in managing her affairs. She received it from her nephew, Merton Newman, Sr., who also lived in the Pierce Street house, occupying two second-story rooms with his wife and nineteen-year-old son.

The top floor of the house was divided into two modest apartments. One of these was tenanted by a couple named Brown. The other had been vacant since the start of the New Year. For nearly two months, Miss Newman had been trying to rent it, displaying a hand-lettered “Room to Let” sign in the big bay window fronting Pierce Street.

On the morning of Saturday, February 20, 1926, Merton Newman was alone in his second-floor apartment, his wife and son having gone out on an errand. Shortly before noon, he heard the doorbell chime. Glancing up from his newspaper, Newman could make out some muffled sounds from below—his aunt going to the front door and exchanging a few words with the caller. Then Merton returned to his reading.

About fifteen minutes later, he laid down his paper. It was chilly in the apartment. The temperature outside was hovering at around forty-eight, but the radiators were stone-cold. He decided to go down to the basement and check the furnace, which had been acting up lately.

The stairs to the cellar ran down from a door in the kitchen. Crossing the kitchen, Merton noticed a half-cooked sausage in a frying pan on the stove. The burner beneath the pan was off. Apparently the caller had caught his aunt in the middle of preparing her lunch, and she had turned off the gas before answering the door.

Merton spent about fifteen minutes in the cellar, tinkering with the furnace, before heading back up to the first floor. As he left the kitchen and stepped into the central hallway, he spotted something—a strange figure walking briskly towards the back door. Merton called out to the man, who paused with a hand on the doorknob and glanced over his shoulder. In the shadowy corridor, Merton couldn’t see much of the stranger’s face. The man was rather oddly dressed, in dark, baggy trousers and a drab, military shirt. In spite of the chilly weather, he was coatless. Merton, who judged the man’s age at around thirty, could see that he was powerfully built, not especially tall but deep-chested and stocky.

“Can I be of assistance?” Merton asked.

“Tell the landlady I will return in an hour,” the stranger replied. “I would like to rent that empty apartment.” With that, he pulled open the door and strode away.

Walking to the back door, Merton looked down the street, but the stranger had already disappeared around the corner. Before returning to his rooms, Merton engaged in a brief conversation with two workmen who were doing repairs on the roof of a neighboring house. Merton called up to them,
asking them to stop by and see him once they were done with their job; his aunt’s roof needed some patching. “All right,” one of the men shouted back. “We will drop by before going home.”

Shutting the back door, Merton returned to his second-floor apartment and, within moments, had become absorbed in some bookkeeping.

It was almost 2:00
P.M
. when he laid down his ledger book and went downstairs in search of his aunt, intending to discuss the possibility of replacing the antiquated furnace. As he passed through the kitchen again, Merton noticed something strange. The frying pan with the unheated sausage was still on the stove.

He walked to his aunt’s bedroom. The door was open, and Merton could see at a glance that his aunt was not inside. He checked the other rooms on the first floor, but she was nowhere to be found.

Puzzled, he ascended to the third floor and knocked on the door of the Browns’ apartment. Charles Brown answered. Yes, he confirmed, both he and his wife had heard Miss Newman up there a few hours ago, talking with someone. The Browns had assumed that the landlady was showing the vacant apartment to a prospective tenant.

Stepping across the hallway, Merton tried the knob of the vacant apartment and found that it was locked. That was peculiar. He pounded on the door. Silence. For some reason, his heart was seized with alarm. Taking a step back, he raised one foot and delivered a powerful kick that sent the door crashing open.

The attic apartment consisted of a single, cramped bedroom and a tiny kitchen, just big enough to accommodate a stove, an icebox, and a sink. Small as she was, Clara Newman’s body covered most of the kitchen floor. She was curled on her left side, naked from the waist down, her housedress having been yanked above her waist. The wooden beads from her old-fashioned necklace lay scattered on the floor.

Shouting for Brown to call the police, Merton dropped to his knees beside his aunt. He shook her by a shoulder as if to rouse her from a nap, though from her ghastly stillness
and the grotesque look on her face, he already knew that the old woman was dead.

The autopsy took place that evening. Police Surgeon Selby R. Strange concluded that the bruises on the victim’s neck had been made by powerful fingers. Miss Newman’s death, he told reporters, “looked like murder by strangulation.” Three officers—Lieutenant Charles Dullea, along with Detective-Sergeants Allan McGinn and Charles Iredale—were assigned to the case. Fingerprints found on the inside knob of the attic door were photographed by Police Photographer George Blum and sent to the Bureau of Criminal Identification in the hope of finding a match.

A hard-looking vagrant was picked up in Oakland within twenty-four hours of the killing but, after viewing the man, Miss Newman’s nephew declared that the suspect was “blameless.” The two workmen who had been repairing the neighboring roof at the time of the murder were questioned as witnesses, but neither man had gotten a good look at the suspect.

The story of Miss Newman’s death—headlined
FIEND MURDER OF SPINSTER
in the
San Francisco Chronicle
—made the front page. But at a time when every day brought news of another stabbing, shooting, bombing, or poisoning, it quickly faded from the papers. The old lady’s murder was shocking but not nearly sensational enough to cause widespread consternation.

The public’s reaction might have been different if Dr. Strange had revealed one appalling detail. Though the surgeon had confirmed that the old lady had been raped—or, as the newspapers put it, “criminally attacked”—he had withheld one fact from the public. The “criminal attack” had been postmortem.

The unknown fiend who had gained entrance to Miss Newman’s house in the guise of a renter had committed a double outrage on the sixty-year-old spinster. First, he had throttled her to death. Then he had raped her corpse.

†

L. C. Douthwaite,
Mass Murder

Earle Nelson was of the type of human wolf who, once having tasted blood, becomes possessed with a lust for killing which cannot be gainsaid.

T
hough officially retired from the real-estate business, Harvey J. Beal kept an office in downtown San Jose where he spent a few hours each week overseeing his investments. At approximately 1:00
P.M
. on Tuesday, March 2, 1926, he kissed his wife, Laura, goodbye and left their ground-floor residence in the Deer Park Apartments, a four-story building in a fashionable residential district of town.

The building itself, at 521 East Santa Clara Street, was actually owned by Mrs. Beal. At that time, all the apartments were occupied except one, a recently vacated, furnished one-bedroom on the third floor. Mrs. Beal, who managed the property, had hung out a “Room to Let” sign just a few days earlier.

In addition to her duties as landlady, Laura Beal was active in church work and as the leader of the local branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. By all accounts, she was a sweet-tempered soul. The photograph of her that would run in the following day’s
Chronicle
shows a woman whose strong, slightly mannish features are softened almost to loveliness by her gentle expression. The picture highlights something else, too: Mrs. Beal’s one, truly elegant feature—her long, lovely neck, as graceful as a flower stem.

When Harvey Beal returned home shortly before 6:00
P.M
., the door to his apartment was open. He called to his wife as he entered the front hallway, but, surprisingly, she wasn’t home. Inside the living room, he found his wife’s reading glasses lying atop the afternoon newspaper at the foot of her favorite easy chair. Assuming that she had gone over to a neighbor’s and would return momentarily, he went into the kitchen and fixed himself a sandwich.

Mr. Beal was not a worrier, but when an hour passed with no sign of his wife, he began to grow concerned. He checked with the other residents of the building, but none of them had seen his wife all day. One of the tenants, however—a woman named Florence Turner—had noticed the door of the Beals’ apartment standing open as early as 4:00
P.M
.

When he heard this information, Mr. Beal’s emotions quickly passed from concern to alarm. Enlisting the aid of his tenants, he began a search of the entire neighborhood, but Laura Beal was nowhere to be found.

By ten, the frantic man was at a loss. There was only one place left to look—the vacant, third-floor apartment. Mr. Beal had already tried the door earlier that evening but had found it locked. Now, fetching the spare key from his wife’s bureau, he hurried back up to the apartment, opened the door, and stepped inside.

He found his wife’s body sprawled across the mattress in the bedroom. From the condition of the room, and the dreadful bruises on her face, he could see that there had been a violent struggle. She had been strangled with the silken cord from her dressing gown, which had been twisted so savagely around her neck that it was embedded in her flesh. Her garments were hiked to her waist. It was clear that the sixty-five-year-old woman had been sexually assaulted, though it wasn’t until the autopsy that Coroner Amos Williams determined she had been raped after death.