Bestial (18 page)

“This may frighten many women,” Chief Jenkins concluded. “But it is better that some should be frightened than there should be any more lives lost. It appears to me that this is the work of someone who is watching these advertisements.”

Even Detective Tackaberry did an abrupt about-face. After sticking to his trunk-suicide theory for several days, he suddenly declared that “Mrs. Withers and Mrs. Fluke were murdered, without a question. And though I haven’t investigated the Mrs. Grant case as yet, I believe she met her death at the hands of the same person.” Beyond the fact that this person was clearly “of unsound mind,” Tackaberry didn’t speculate about the killer’s identity, though, like Captain Moore, he alluded to the string of landlady murders down in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.

Up in Oregon, of course, most people were unaware of the California crimes. In its Sunday edition, however, the
Morning Oregonian
filled its readers in on the story. For the first time, the citizens of Portland learned the chilling sobriquet of the fiend who had been terrorizing the Bay cities: the “Dark Strangler.”

Remarkably, however, there were still some officials in Portland who clung tenaciously, if not desperately, to the belief that the deaths of Mrs. Withers, Grant, and Fluke were simply three unrelated tragedies. Though the irreducible facts of the Fluke case—a strangled female corpse concealed in an attic—seemed like a pretty strong indication of foul play, a deputy coroner named Guldransen opined that the unfortunate woman may well have taken her own life by arranging herself on the attic floor, then knotting the scarf about her own neck. The bruises on her elbows, Guldransen explained, had evidently been caused by her “efforts to draw the knots tight, one arm having struck the side wall of the attic, the other the floor.”

The debate over Beata Withers’ “trunk death,” meanwhile, remained as heated as ever. After consulting several medical treatises on asphyxiation, County Coroner Earl Smith told reporters that, as far as he could see, the Withers case “looked like murder.” During the “second stage” of asphyxiation, he explained, the person lapses into unconsciousness, but the body and limbs begin moving spasmodically, even violently, “due to the action of uncirculated blood on the nerves.” If Mrs. Withers had suffocated inside the trunk, Smith said, she would have dislodged the tray and trunk lid in her death throes. Her body certainly wouldn’t
have been lying in the “peaceful, apparently sleeping attitude in which it was found.”

There was only one possible conclusion, Smith said. Mrs. Withers was already dead before she was placed in the trunk.

Counter to Coroner Smith’s statement, however, was the opinion of a “high police official,” who, speaking anonymously to reporters on Sunday evening, pointed out that there were no apparent marks of violence on Mrs. Withers’ body. Moreover, her “love diary” proved that she was “hopelessly despondent, that she owed bills amounting to several hundred dollars, and that her house was about to be turned over to the mortgage holders.” For these and other reasons—including the testimony of her good friend, Bob Frentzel, who told investigators that she had threatened suicide the previous year—the unnamed official held firm to his belief that Beata Withers had taken her own life.

Over the next few days, the controversy continued to rage. Early Monday morning, Chief Jenkins, pronouncing the situation “the most baffling and mysterious ever to come within the scope of the Portland police,” met with Mayor Baker to request an emergency appropriation of $1,000. The funds, the chief told reporters, would be used “to bring to the city some nationally known criminologist to take charge of the case.” Expressing his belief that the three deaths appeared to be the work of a “methodically working pervert,” Jenkins declared that “if such a killer is at large, the matter of money should be our smallest worry.”

To be sure, there was no indication that any of the women had been sexually molested, a fact which, in the view of certain officials, seemed to undercut the murder theory. Asked about this aspect of the case, Chief Jenkins replied that there were “numerous varieties of perverts,” including those who killed “solely for the thrill of it.”

Every available detective had been assigned to the case. In addition to James Tackaberry and his partner, Robert Phillips, the team consisted of a dozen investigators including, by a bizarre coincidence, one named Earl Nelson. “As of now,” Chief Jenkins declared, “all other police work is secondary.”

Other members of the department, however, continued to
take issue with the chief, insisting that Beata Withers had committed suicide and that Virginia Grant, who suffered from heart disease, had died of natural causes. As for Mabel Fluke, these skeptics conceded that she may have been killed, but her death, they argued, was unrelated to the others. Whatever similarities existed among the three cases were “merely coincidental.”

Of course, the skeptics had trouble explaining away certain inconvenient facts, such as the missing overcoats and jewelry. On Monday evening, Mrs. Withers’ cousin, Carl Duhrkoop, made another discovery that cast serious doubt on the suicide theory. Going through Beata’s belongings, Mr. Duhrkoop discovered that every piece of the dead woman’s underwear was gone.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Baker met in his office with a group of officials, including Police Chief Jenkins; Detective Lieutenants Thatcher and Graves; County Coroner Earl Smith; and the three physicians in charge of the autopsies, Drs. Robert Benson, Harvey Myers, and Frank Menne. The purpose of the conference, the first of its kind in Portland history, was (as the newspapers reported) “to coordinate the scientific and medical features of the cases with the police angles.”

Nothing, however, came out of the meeting but more ambiguity. While Jenkins and his subordinates saw the deaths as the work of a single killer—“someone using some cunning method”—the physicians were inclined to the opposite view, that the three cases were unconnected. According to their preliminary findings, “Mrs. Fluke met death by strangulation, possibly self-imposed; Mrs. Grant died of natural causes; and Mrs. Withers died of suffocation, possibly selfinflicted.”

The coroner’s jury investigating the Withers case was riven by the same conflict of opinion. Convening on Wednesday evening, the six jurors heard the testimony of various witnesses, including Mrs. Withers’ fifteen-year-old son, Charles; her good friend, Bob Frentzel; her neighbor, G. C. Cook (who, along with Frentzel, had found the body); coroner’s physician Benson; and a police inspector named R. H. Craddock (the officer who, at Detective Tackaberry’s orders, had squeezed inside the trunk).

After deliberating for more than an hour, however, the jury failed to reach a verdict, with three members reportedly voting for suicide, the others for murder.

The matter remained unresolved the following day, when funeral services for Beata Withers were held at the Miller and Tracy chapel. Immediately afterwards, her body was transported to the Portland crematorium for its final disposition.

On Friday, October 29, 1926, Portlanders were briefly distracted from the case of the three “mystery deaths” by some sad news from Detroit.

One week earlier in Montreal, Harry Houdini had been visited backstage by a young McGill University student named J. Gordon Whitehead, who took a dim view of Houdini’s debunking crusade against Spiritualism. Whitehead asked Houdini if it were true that, as the magician often claimed, his stomach was so solid that it could sustain the hardest punches. Raising his arms, Houdini invited the young man to feel the muscles.

Without warning, Whitehead delivered a flurry of savage blows to Houdini’s body, directly above the appendix. By that night, the fifty-two-year-old magician was suffering from agonizing abdominal pains. In spite of a temperature of 104 degrees, he performed in Detroit on Sunday, October 24, but collapsed as soon as the show was over. The following day, he was rushed to the hospital, where his ruptured appendix was removed. By Friday morning, peritonitis had developed.

Houdini’s dire condition was front-page news everywhere in the nation, including Portland, where the
Oregonian
reported that physicians attending the Great Escapologist had “expressed doubts about his recovery.” It wasn’t long before those doubts were confirmed. By Sunday, Harry barely had strength to talk. “I’m tired of fighting,” he whispered to his brother, Theo. “I guess this thing is going to get me.” The next day, Monday, October 31—Halloween—the “master mystifier” passed on to the “other side,” though not before promising his beloved wife, Bess, that he would do his best to contact her from the “great beyond.”

*    *    *

The day before Houdini’s death, a Portland policeman named James Russell received a letter from his cousin, George, who lived in Santa Barbara. By a grim coincidence, this cousin was the same George Russell whose wife, Ollie, had been killed by the “Dark Strangler” the previous June. Included in the letter was a description of the suspect that had appeared in the Santa Barbara papers: “Thirty-five years old, 5 feet 8 or 10 inches tall, heavy build, especially shoulders and chest, and very dark. Said to be of Greek nativity, though speaking excellent English and to be a restaurant worker—either a cook or dishwasher—and also a construction worker.”

As Patrolman Russell read this letter, he suddenly recalled that, while making his rounds on the previous Tuesday, he had spotted someone matching this very description in the vicinity of Mabel Fluke’s house in Sellwood. At the time, of course, Russell had thought nothing of it, but now he wondered if the man he had seen was really the “Dark Strangler.”

Russell’s story immediately made it into the
Oregonian
, which published the description of the strangler suspect in its Saturday edition—too late to do any good. By that time, the elusive killer, whose escapist skills had once earned him a comparison to Houdini himself, had already vanished from the city.

†

Frederick Lewis Allen,
Only Yesterday

Five million words were written and sent from Somerville, New Jersey, during the first eleven days of the trial. Twice as many newspaper men were there as at Dayton …. Over wires jacked into the largest telegraph switchboard in the world traveled the tidings of lust and crime to every corner of the United States, and the public lapped them up and cried for more.

I
f asked to name the most famous trial of the 1920s, most people would immediately think of Leopold and Loeb, or Sacco and Vanzetti, or possibly the so-called Dayton “Monkey Trial,” whose defendant, John T. Scopes, was found guilty of teaching evolution. For sheer sensationalism, however, none of these matched the proceedings that got underway in a New Jersey courthouse in early November 1926. The case in question was a double homicide, the most notorious since Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Borden were hacked to death by a mysterious assailant who may or may not have been their daughter, Lizzie. It would be another seventy years before a different double slaying, that of O. J. Simpson’s estranged wife and her waiter-friend, Ron Goldman, generated such frenzied fascination.

The murders themselves had taken place four years earlier in New Brunswick, New Jersey. On the morning of September 16, 1922, a young couple strolling on a dusty back road
had stumbled upon two bodies in an apple orchard. Sprawled on their backs under a crab apple tree, the corpses were those of a man and a woman. The dead man was dressed in a dark blue suit and a clerical collar. His Panama hat had been placed over his face, as though to shade him from the sun. Beside him lay the woman, her legs demurely crossed, her head resting on her companion’s outstretched right arm. She was wearing a polka-dotted blue dress, the hem tugged as far below her knees as the fabric would allow. A brown scarf had been draped over her throat. Beneath the scarf, her throat was slashed from ear to ear and was swarming with maggots. The autopsy would later reveal that her tongue, larynx, and windpipe had been cut out. She had also been shot three times in the face at point-blank range. Though the dead man had not been subjected to the same mutilations, he had been killed with chilling deliberation, executed with a single .32-caliber bullet to the brain.

It was not the savagery of the killings that made the case so sensational, however, but rather the identity of the victims. The dead man turned out to be the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church and a pillar of the community. He was married to Mrs. Frances Hall, née Stevens, daughter of one of New Brunswick’s most prominent families. The dead woman found at his side, however, was not his matronly, forty-eight-year-old wife. She was Mrs. Eleanor Mills, a pretty thirty-four-year-old who sang in the congregation choir and was married to the church’s sexton.

The exact nature of their relationship was made explicit in a batch of torrid love letters that had been scattered around their corpses. “Sweetheart, my true heart,” Eleanor Mills had written in one. “I know there are girls with more shapely bodies, but I’m not caring what they have. I have the greatest part of all blessings, a noble man’s deep, true, eternal love, and my heart is his, my life is his; poor as my body is, scrawny as my skin may be; but I am his forever. How impatient I am and will be! I want to look up into your dear face for hours as you touch my body close.”

The pastor’s replies were equally ardent. “Darling Wonder Heart,” he had written. “I just want to crush you for two hours. I want to see you Friday night alone by our road;
where we can let out, unrestrained, that universe of joy and happiness we call ours.” He signed himself “D.T.L.,” short for
Deiner Treuer Liebhaber
(“Thy True Lover” in German). Mrs. Mills, preferring a less formal endearment, referred to the pastor as “Babykins.”

This steaming porridge of sex, murder, and scandal proved irresistible to the tabloids, which began dishing up great, daily gobs to their readers. New Brunswick was overrun with reporters. The nationwide coverage turned the old Phillips farm, where the bodies were found, into a major tourist attraction. On weekends the crime scene became a virtual carnival with vendors hawking popcorn, peanuts, soft drinks, and balloons to the hordes of the morbidly curious.