Bestial (29 page)

The article went on to describe the progress of the police investigation. Officers had arrived at 100 Riverton Street within minutes of receiving Patterson’s frantic call. Inside, they found several of his stunned neighbors gathered around the rumpled bed, which someone had shoved about two feet away from the wall. Patterson himself, almost stupefied with grief, was being comforted in an adjoining room by his neighbor, Mrs. Stanger, while another Samaritan attended to his two sobbing children.

Clearing everyone from the crime scene, the three constables—Mann, Wood, and Gibson—carefully dismantled the single bed, completely exposing Emily Patterson’s corpse. The twenty-three-year-old woman lay sprawled on her back,
the lower half of her body twisted sideways. She was still fully clad, though her skirt had been yanked above her hips and her stockings rolled below her knees. Her face was smeared with blood from her battered nose and mouth, and there was an ugly bruise on her forehead.

Coroner Herman Cameron, who arrived shortly after the three constables, determined that Mrs. Patterson had been struck on the head with a blunt instrument—possibly the hammer that her husband had found inside his suitcase—then asphyxiated by smothering and strangulation. She also had been raped, apparently after death. Cameron found a glaze of dried seminal fluid on the front of her right thigh.

While the coroner oversaw the removal of Mrs. Patterson’s corpse to Kerr’s undertaking parlor (where a complete postmortem would be performed by Dr. W. P. McCowan), two detectives, Charles McIver and Harold Fox, conducted a thorough search of the house. It wasn’t long before they made several important discoveries. A threadbare suit belonging to the overwrought husband turned out to be missing from his bedroom. It had evidently been stolen by the killer, whose own discarded clothes—a shabby blue jacket and brown cottonade trousers—were found heaped in a corner of the room. Inside the pocket of the trousers the detectives discovered some crumpled newspaper classifieds torn from the “Rooms to Let” section of the
Winnipeg Tribune
.

From this telltale clue, and the conspicuous thumb marks on the victim’s throat, Detective Sergeant McIver quickly deduced that the killer was none other than the infamous “strangler fiend” who had already slain twenty victims in the States. The Winnipeg P.D. had recently received a circular describing the homicides from the Buffalo police.

Mrs. Patterson hadn’t been a landlady, but in every other respect her murder bore all the earmarks of the killer’s m.o. Surmising that, if the strangler struck again, he would probably seek out his favorite type of victim, Chief Detective George Smith immediately directed all available personnel to visit every rooming house in Winnipeg.

Apprised of these developments by her morning paper, Catherine Hill was not at all surprised when, shortly before noon on Saturday, June 11, two detectives showed up at her
home. She invited them into her parlor, where they proceeded to question her about her lodgers. Had any suspicious-looking men rented rooms from her recently? Had any of her boarders checked out in a hurry during the last few days? To both these questions Mrs. Hill answered, “No.”

She wasn’t lying, at least as far as she knew. Her only new lodger was Mr. Woodcoats. But in spite of his coarse appearance, he had turned out to be such a devout and idealistic young man that it never occurred to Mrs. Hill that he might be a murder suspect. Besides, though she hadn’t laid eyes on him since Thursday evening when he’d unexpectedly appeared at her kitchen doorway, she believed that he was still residing at her house. He had certainly never checked out. Indeed, she was still expecting the two-dollar balance he owed on his rent.

By the following morning, however, Sunday, June 12, Mrs. Hill had begun to feel troubled by doubts, which grew stronger by the hour as the day passed with no sign of Mr. Woodcoats. Finally, at around 4:30
P.M
., she mounted the stairs and, after knocking on his door and receiving no response, let herself into the room.

Two things struck her immediately. One was the state of the room, which had clearly not been occupied since Friday morning when she had come upstairs to clean. The bed had obviously not been slept in, and the fresh towel she had placed on the bureau was untouched. The other thing that struck her was the stink—a thick, fetid odor like the stench of decay.

Mrs. Hill assumed that she was smelling the lingering reek of the unbathed Mr. Woodcoats, which had intensified in the closeness of the shut-up room. Wrinkling her nose, she crossed to the window, raised the blinds, and threw open the sash. Sunlight and clean air poured into the room. Turning, she headed for the landing, leaving the door wide-open behind her.

Downstairs, she summoned her husband and shared her concern. She was afraid that she might have inadvertently lied to the police. She now believed that Mr. Woodcoats had, in fact, absconcded without paying his rent.

Mr. Hill promised that he would stop off at the police station on his way to church that evening. He left the house
at around 5:30
P.M
. Arrriving at the Central Station about twenty minutes later, he was interviewed by Chief of Detectives George Smith, who was intensely interested in what the old man had to say. Hoping that the landlady might be able to identify the discarded men’s clothing found at the Patterson house, Smith immediately ordered one of his men to convey it to Smith Street.

Even as the detective was on his way to the Hills’ boardinghouse, however, a discovery was taking place there that, for sheer sensational horror, almost matched the melodrama of William Patterson’s experience.

One of Mrs. Hill’s lodgers was a man named Bernhardt Mortenson. Mortenson and his wife occupied a spacious room just off the parlor, one of the nicest in the house. Its only disadvantage was its distance from the bathroom, which was located on the second-floor landing.

After returning from a midday outing with his wife at around 6:00
P.M
. on Sunday, Mortenson went upstairs to use the facilities. As he walked back towards the stairwell a few minutes later, he passed the little room at the head of the landing, the one that had been recently rented to the new arrival, Mr. Woodcoats. For the past few days, Woodcoats’ door had been continuously shut. Now it stood open.

As Mortenson began descending the stairs, he happened to glance over into Woodcoats’ room. In the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the window, he thought he could make out something peculiar beneath the bed. Pausing, he squinted at the thing, then let out a gasp. The sight was so startling that he had to grab hold of the bannister to keep his balance.

Fleeing downstairs, he shouted for the landlady, who came bustling out of the kitchen in alarm.

“What’s wrong?” she cried.

Mortenson was a Dane and, even under the best of circumstances, his English was shaky. Now he was barely coherent.

“Mrs. Hill! Upstairs! Somebody there!”

When the landlady stood frozen in perplexity, he grabbed her by an elbow and urged her upstairs.

Inside Woodcoats’ room, Mortenson gestured wildly towards the bed. “Under there!” he shouted. Mrs. Hill had
never seen him look so pale. Dread welled up inside her as she lowered herself to one knee and peered beneath the bed.

Wedged beneath the bedsprings was the body of a naked young girl. The slender corpse was curled on its side, turned towards the wall.

“Oh, God!” shrieked Mrs. Hill. “It’s dead! Quick! The police!”

Mortenson was so agitated that he forgot there was a telephone in the parlor. Tearing downstairs, he ran to the house of a neighbor, Harvey Pape, who listened in astonishment to Mortenson’s frantic story, then put in a call to the Central Station.

By late Sunday afternoon, the Winnipeg police were more convinced than ever that Emily Patterson had been killed by the same itinerant madman who had already slain twenty women throughout the United States. Chief Christopher H. Newton, who was in Windsor, Ontario, attending the annual International Police Chiefs’ Convention, had been keeping abreast of the situation in his city by wire and telephone. As it happened, another participant in the conference was Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson of San Francisco, who had been involved in the strangler case from the beginning.

Matheson not only concurred with the belief that the strangler was now at large in Canada but offered to stop off in Winnipeg on his way back to San Francisco and assist in any way he could. In the meantime, Newton and his second-in-command, Acting Chief Constable Philip Stark, had decided to issue a citywide alert.

By 6:00
P.M
. on Sunday, a bulletin had been drafted. Before it could be broadcast over the radio, however, word arrived at Central Station that another victim had been found in a Smith Street boardinghouse.

The discovery of the second slaying confirmed the worst fears of the police. The bulletin was quickly revised. At approximately 6:30
P.M
., an announcer broke into the weekly broadcast of the Sunday evening church service with the news that two local women had been strangled to death by a killer, believed to be the same “notorious murderer wanted for twenty similar murders in the United States.”

“All women with ‘rooms to let’ or ‘for sale’ signs on houses are cautioned,” the announcer intoned. “This man may have taken a room from you in the last few days, or he may come to your house for a room or to see the house. Do not admit him if you are alone. Keep your door hooked and put him off. Watch where he goes and notify the police as soon as you can. Don’t get excited. If you have a ‘for sale’ or ‘for rent’ sign on your house, this man will seek a pretext to enter your home. Do not admit any stranger; you will then be safe. Do the same as we are asking the rooming keepers to do. Put him off and notify the police.”

Listeners were warned to be on the lookout for a man “twenty-six to thirty years of age, about five foot six or seven inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds with large dark eyes, full face, sallow complexion, clean shaven, dark brown hair, and broad shouldered. Evidently a transient of Jewish or Italian appearance but might be any nationality. He speaks good English.”

The police announcer concluded with a final plea to “all railway men, both passenger and freight crews, to help us catch this fiend, who is a degenerate of the worst type, and protect other defenseless women.”

Even before the Sunday evening radio broadcast was interrupted by the special police bulletin, word of the latest murder had swept through the Hills’ neighborhood. By 7:00
P.M
., Smith Street was so jammed that motorists had to detour around the block. Before the evening ended, more than 500 people—men, women, children, and a growing mob of reporters—would gather at the scene.

While a pair of constables guarded the entranceway—keeping both gawkers and newsmen at bay—the crowd milled around the boardinghouse, exchanging hearsay and straining to see through the glowing, second-story window where grim, blue-coated figures moved about the room. The atmosphere on the block was charged with that peculiar mix of shocked disbelief and morbid excitement characteristic of crime scenes.

One local resident, an early arrival on the scene, held forth with an air of smug authority, passing along the few reliable facts that had filtered from the house. A girl, apparently
dead for several days, had been found stuffed beneath a bed, just like that unfortunate Patterson woman in Elmwood. Clearly, the same maniac was responsible for both atrocities.

One of the listeners declared that another Winnipeg woman would undoubtedly die before the madman was caught. After all, murders, like every other kind of bad accident, always came in threes.

Meanwhile, a little boy engaged in a make-believe reenactment of the crime, playfully throttling his little sister until she broke away and ran screaming for her mommy. Nearby, a cluster of teenage girls spoke in spellbound whispers about the titillating rumors of rape. And a sullen-looking stranger, slouching on the outskirts of the crowd, drew more than one suspicious stare from bystanders who wondered if he might possibly be the killer himself, inexorably drawn back to the scene of his heinous crime.

John Hill, in the meantime, was completely unaware of the crisis at his home. After stopping off at the Central Station to convey his wife’s suspicions, he had proceeded to church. He had spent the next hour engrossed in the service, while thousands of his fellow Winnipeggers, who preferred the convenience of radio prayer, were being alerted to the latest homicide.

As a result, when Hill stepped off the trolley at around 7:30
P.M
. and saw the crowd around his house, he felt a sharp pang of fear, which grew into something like panic when he heard an onlooker refer to “the murdered woman.”

Pushing his way through the crowd and into his house, he mounted the stairs, exclaiming with relief when he caught sight of his wife. Pale but clearly unharmed, she was talking to a policeman in the little front room on the second floor. Hill’s pleasure, however, was quickly undercut by the sight that assaulted him as he entered the room.

The bed, which normally stood in the southwest corner, had been moved aside. Curled on the floor was a naked female body, stiff and livid. The slender corpse lay on its left side, turned towards the wall, knees slightly flexed, right arm bent, left stretched flat beneath the body. From where
he stood, Hill could see a patch of dried blood caked on the left thigh, just below the girl’s buttocks.

A man in a brown business suit, who turned out to be Coroner Cameron, was crouched beside the body, while several policemen hovered nearby, conferring in hushed voices. Even with the window wide open, the stench of death was thick in the room.

Hill averted his eyes from the ghastly thing on the floor and, hit with a sudden wave of dizziness, sank onto the straight-backed wooden chair beside the bureau.

At that moment, no one knew who the murder victim was. Constable B. L. Payne, the first officer to arrive on the scene, had made a thorough search of the room. But he had found none of the girl’s clothes or anything else that might help with an identification.