Bestial (24 page)

Indeed, it was only a matter of time, Tennant was convinced, before the “Dark Strangler” reappeared in Portland or one of the other Pacific Coast cities and claimed “victim number twelve.”

†

John Milton,
Paradise Lost

Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.

B
ut Detective Chief Tennant was wrong. The killer would never return to Portland or to any of his previous hunting grounds. By now the Pacific Coast really had gotten too hot for him.

By the time of Tennant’s news conference, the killer had already embarked on an odyssey that would eventually take him to the opposite end of the continent and halfway back again. Keeping on the move, however, was not a problem for the homicidal maniac now variously known as the “Dark Strangler,” the “Phantom Killer,” and the “Beast Man.” Ever since adolescence—when he would disappear from the home of his long-suffering family for weeks at a time—he had been possessed of a powerful wanderlust.

Three weeks after Blanche Myers’ murder, he would show up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, at the precise midpoint of the country. For the next six months, he would trace a roughly trapezoidal course, heading southward to Kansas City, Missouri, then straight across to Philadelphia, up into Buffalo, and westward again to Detroit and Chicago. And everywhere he went, women died.

On the day before Christmas, 1926, Mrs. John Brerard of Council Bluffs became the strangler’s twelfth victim. The
forty-one-year-old woman lived with her husband and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Corene, in a simple two-story house at 351 Willow Avenue, within earshot of the city’s business district. The house had been built for them four years earlier when the Brerards had moved to Council Bluffs from their previous home in Emerson, Iowa.

To supplement Mr. Brerard’s modest earnings as a passenger agent for the Burlington Railroad, the couple rented out the two spare bedrooms on the second floor. The larger of these had originally been occupied by their older daughter, Evelyn, a nurse at the Methodist Hospital in Omaha, who had recently gotten married and moved into a home of her own. For the past few months, Evelyn’s former bedroom had been rented out to a thirty-four-year-old fireman for the Burlington Railroad named Robert Moore, an old family friend.

The other, smaller room had been vacant for nearly a year. As in most of the previous murder cases, there was a hand-lettered “Room to Rent” sign prominently displayed in a front window of the Brerard home.

At approximately 3:15
P.M.
on December 24, Moore headed downstairs on his way to work. As he passed by the living room, he saw Mrs. Brerard chatting with someone he had never laid eyes on before, a burly, dark-complexioned man dressed in somewhat shabby clothing.

Beckoning to Moore, the landlady introduced him to the stranger, whose name, she said, was “Mr. Williams.” Moore, who was late for work, barely took note of the other man. As he later explained to police, he assumed that the fellow “was probably some worker in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, of which Mrs. Brerard was an active member.” Giving the stranger’s hand a quick shake, Moore said that it had been nice to meet him, then hurried from the house—never to see Mrs. Brerard alive again.

The discovery of her body followed what was by now a dismayingly familiar pattern. At around four in the afternoon, the Brerards’ younger daughter, Corene, returned from her job as a salesgirl in a local millinery shop and found the house empty. Though her mother was normally home at that hour, engaged in dinner preparations, Corene was not concerned. There was a big family gathering
planned for the following day in celebration of both Christmas and Mrs. Brerard’s birthday, which fell on December 28. Corene assumed that her mother must have gone out to do some last-minute shopping.

When Mr. Brerard returned from work shortly after five, father and daughter headed out on an eleventh-hour shopping expedition of their own. It wasn’t until they returned to the house an hour or so later, expecting to find Mrs. Brerard in the kitchen, that they began to get worried. She was still nowhere in sight.

While John Brerard descended to the basement, Corene headed upstairs to check the vacant rooms. Moments later, she was rushing back down the staircase in response to a sound she had never heard before in her life—her father’s terrified shrieks, so loud and piercing that they carried throughout the entire house.

She had just reached the ground floor when her father came stumbling up the stairs from the basement, half-delirious with fear. “It’s Mother!” he cried. “Go for help!”

There was no telephone in the Brerard house. Dashing to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Henry Frandsen of 207 Fourth Street, Corene called the police. Within minutes, Sheriff P. A. Lainson and two of his deputies were at the crime scene, where they found John Brerard almost cataleptic with shock.

He was staring fixedly at the furnace. Peering behind it, Lainson saw Mrs. Brerard’s lifeless body wedged between the back of the furnace and the basement wall. She had been strangled with a man’s cotton shirt, which had apparently been plucked from a clothesline strung across the ceiling beams.

Though Mrs. Brerard was a frail, small-boned woman, she had clearly put up a terrific struggle. Her face and arms were badly bruised, the floor was stained with blood, there were clumps of her hair stuck to the furnace door. Her husband’s neatly organized workbench had been overturned, and his tools lay scattered across the basement floor.

In spite of this evidence, one local official, County Attorney Frank Northrop, made an astonishing pronouncement. Shortly after the discovery of Mrs. Brerard’s body, Northrop met with reporters and revealed that the victim had recently been discharged from St. Bernard’s mental hospital, where
she had been treated for a “nervous disorder.” Given her fragile emotional state, Northrop declared, it was possible “that the shirt may have been knotted about her throat in a suicide attempt.”

But Northrop (whose deductive skills clearly rivalled those of James M. Tackaberry, the Portland detective who hypothesized that Mrs. Beata Withers had taken her own life by stuffing herself inside an attic trunk) was alone in this opinion. Everyone else, from Sheriff P. A. Lainson to the victim’s overwrought husband, believed that she had been slam by the mysterious “Mr. Williams,” possibly in the course of a thwarted rape.

“It seems very plain to me,” Lainson told newsmen shortly after examining the murder scene, “that her attacker intended to commit a criminal assault and, failing in his effort, killed her for fear she would report the attack to us.”

The question, of course, was the true identity of “Williams.” Some investigators believed that he was himself a former inmate of St. Bernard’s who had developed a deadly obsession with Mrs. Brerard. But a search of the hospital’s records turned up no one matching the suspect’s description.

Sheriff Lainson—who had been following the recent rash of killings on the West Coast—offered another, much more chilling theory, which was reported by the local paper, the
Council Bluffs Nonpareil
, on Christmas morning, the day after Mrs. Brerard’s murder. Prominently featured on page one was a black-bordered box headlined
WARNING
! The text read as follows:

Saying it was possible that Mrs. John Brerard was killed by a “strangler” such as has killed women in California, Oregon, and Washington during the past few months, Sheriff P. A. Lainson this afternoon asked
The Nonpareil
to warn housewives of this city against admitting to their homes a man of the description of the “Mr. Williams” known to have called at the Brerard home shortly before Mrs. Brerard was found dead. The description is:

Height—-Five feet, eight inches.

Weight—180 pounds.

Complexion—Dark.

Eyes—Dark, piercing.

Clothing—Pearl-colored hat, mouse-colored coat, over-shoes.

Sheriff Lainson’s theory was bolstered that very day when another witness came forward. After seeing Lainson’s warning in Saturday’s
Nonpareil
, a Council Bluffs matron, Mrs. O. H. Brown, telephoned his office with a chilling tale.

Just thirty minutes before the Brerard slaying, according to Mrs. Brown, a squat, swarthy man had appeared on the doorstep of her house at 232 Tenth Avenue, which had a wooden “For Sale” sign planted on the front lawn. Introducing himself as “Mr. Williams,” the man—who was perfectly polite and well-spoken, if somewhat shabbily dressed—explained that he was a railroad switchman, originally from Milwaukee and currently living in Omaha. He was about to be transferred to Iowa and was thinking of buying a house in Council Bluffs to be “nearer to his work.”

Mrs. Brown, whose husband was at work in his bakery a few blocks away, invited him inside. After examining every room in the house, “Williams” asked to see the basement furnace. By then, however, Mrs. Brown had grown wary of the dark-complexioned stranger. “I was afraid of him,” she would later explain to a reporter for the
Nonpareil
. “His eyes were so black and piercing, with an odd glint in them, that I became afraid and hurried him to the door, asking him to call the store and talk to my husband.”

If it had not been for her suspicions, the shaken woman now realized, it would have been she, not poor Mrs. Brerard, lying dead behind a furnace. As it turned out, Mrs. Brown was not the only local woman to have had a close brush with the killer. Late Saturday afternoon, Council Bluffs Fire Chief James Cotter received a phone call from a Mrs. J. B. Walters, who said that a man matching the published description of the suspect had visited her home the previous Thursday afternoon, claiming to be an “inspector of furnaces” for the fire department. Mrs. Walters, who was alone at the time, refused to admit him to her house. As it happened, this wasn’t the first time that Chief Cotter had received such a report. Indeed, for the past few days, he had been contacted by at least a half-dozen housewives who had
been approached in precisely the same way by the fraudulent “furnace inspector.”

By Saturday evening, even County Attorney Northrop had discarded his suicide theory and conceded that the mysterious “Mr. Williams” was undoubtedly the notorious “Dark Strangler,” responsible for eleven brutal murders up and down the Pacific Coast. Police Chief E. N. Catterlin had conferred with his counterparts in San Francisco and Seattle and obtained a detailed description of the strangler suspect. Point for point, the description fit the man Robert Moore saw speaking to Mrs. Brerard just before her death.

Even as the slain woman’s corpse was making its way by the Rock Island Railroad to its final resting place in Hennessey, Oklahoma, the Brerards’ hometown, a small army of law enforcement agents was scouring every city from Omaha to Des Moines for the suspect. An apparent breakthrough occurred on Sunday, December 26, when a drifter named John O’Brien, who bore a vague resemblance to the strangler, was arrested in Creston, Iowa, after trying to force his way into the home of a local housewife. Within hours, Robert Moore, accompanied by Council Bluffs Police Chief E. N. Catterlin and several newspaper reporters, was on his way to Creston. But after viewing the suspect in the Creston city jail, Moore announced that O’Brien was “positively not the man I saw with Mrs. Brerard.”

With that, the Iowa authorities found themselves in the same baffled situation as their counterparts in the West—“as far away as ever from a solution to the case,” as the
Nonpareil
reported.

†

Kansas City, Missouri

Bring in the slayer, dead or alive.
L. R. Toyne, Chief of Detectives,

E
ven before Moore and his escorts arrived in Creston, the strangler had already migrated southward to Kansas City, Missouri, where, within twenty-four hours, he added three more victims to his tally.

At approximately 2:00
P.M.
on Monday, December 27, a twenty-eight-year-old workman named Raymond Pace returned to his home at 3920 Hammond Street after cashing a $7.50 paycheck for a construction job he had completed that morning. The instant he stepped through the front door, he was greeted by a feeble cry from the bedroom of his son, Victor, an alarmingly frail six-year-old who suffered from a tubercular spine.

“Mamma fell down the stairs,” the bedridden boy whimpered when his father hurried to his side. Pace rushed to the stairwell, but his wife, Bonnie—a slender, twenty-three-year-old brunette—was nowhere in sight.

He found her in an upstairs bedroom, her body sprawled across the mattress, her house dress yanked above her hips, ugly bruises on her throat. Later, Deputy Coroner C. S. Nelson confirmed that she had died of manual strangulation. Her body temperature indicated that she had been slain sometime between 10:00
A.M.
and noon.

When Detectives W. S. Shumway and Roy Bondure arrived to question little Victor, the boy explained that he had heard someone arrive at the house earlier in the day. The caller—a grown man, judging by the sound of his voice—had been admitted by Mrs. Pace, who presently led him upstairs. Soon afterwards, Victor had heard a muffled commotion from above, then a heavy thud on the staircase. Seconds later, the front door slammed as the man fled the house.

Victor called out to his mother again and again but received no reply. Clearly something bad had happened to her. Judging from the noises he had heard, the six-year-old thought that she might have fallen down the stairs.

When the detectives asked Victor if he had any idea who the man was, the boy nodded and identified him as a truck driver named Robert McKinley, an old family friend. Victor hadn’t actually seen the caller but assumed it was McKinley, since (as he told the police) the truck driver “was always coming around to visit Mamma when Poppa was away at work.”

McKinley immediately became the prime suspect but was able to provide an airtight alibi. Though Raymond Pace was so broken up that he had to be sedated, he, too, fell under suspicion after investigators learned that he had known about and been fiercely jealous of his wife’s friendship with McKinley. As soon as Pace was coherent enough for questioning, however, he was able to supply a solid account of his whereabouts at the time of the murder.