Killer Dads (24 page)

The Coxes, steady, determined people, continue to seek closure for their daughter. They're comforted by their religious faith and the belief that Susan has been reunited with Braden and Charlie, but they're angry with the West Valley police, Washington social services, and Steven Powell. They continue to battle for all remaining information in all police files not yet released by investigators. They hope that some overlooked detail might help the search for their daughter's body. They've established the Susan Cox Powell Foundation to assist and support families whose loved ones are missing, and they are raising awareness about the Christmas Box House, a Utah facility that provides shelter for abused children. The Coxes marked the third anniversary of Susan's disappearance in late 2012 by unveiling an angel memorial statue installed near Charlie and Braden's grave in Woodbine Cemetery in Puyallup. It's been a long, painful road. “Something positive has developed out of this,” Chuck said of the foundation the Coxes have established. “But we need to find Susan.”

William Beadle thought about killing his wife and children for three years.
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He had been a proud, successful Connecticut retailer, wealthier than most, according to one reporter. But business went south, and he made an investment in currency that failed badly, and he was so shaken by his plunging fortune that he considered suicide––and taking his family with him. Increasingly preoccupied with the idea, as the bloody day approached, he began to place a carving knife and an ax along his bedside each evening, apparently prepared to take action in the middle of the night if it came to that. Usually a loving husband and indulgent dad, Beadle was forced to adopt the “most rigid family economy” while attempting to maintain an outward appearance of normalcy, according to friend Stephen Mix Mitchell, who wrote an account of what was soon to be Beadle's notorious activities.
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It didn't work. “I am in such a situation” that I can't provide food, clothing, nor fuel for myself and family, the 52-year-old dad wrote to his friend John Chester in a letter found among a collection of writings by Beadle that may be the most complete personal account ever of the thought processes leading to a family annihilation.
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“Is it not time to die?”

Besides, he felt rotten. A man could become “meaner than meanness itself” if he fell “by unavoidable accident into poverty, and then submits to be laughed at and despised and trampled upon by a set of wretches as far below him as the moon is below the sun,” explained Beadle in one of his letters.

But he struggled with his conscience before he attacked his family. He decided to murder his children relatively easily. He believed he was in charge of their fate, and opted to kill his three young daughters and son—ages 6 to 11—to “consign them over to better hands” in an afterlife.

He had a more difficult time deciding the future of his wife, Lydia. Beadle had doubts as to whether it was his duty to “destroy my wife, as I had no hand in bringing her into the world.” But he weighed that against her inability to earn a living or to find another partner after his suicide, particularly in the wake of what he knew would be considered the “shocking disaster” of his murder of their children. In addition, losing her babies in such a massacre would be a disturbing “distraction” for his wife, to say the least, and might even cause a “state of mind that would be worse,” Beadle admitted. He eventually decided that he and his wife should “take our leave together.” As for suicide, he boasted to his friend: “It's the act of a hero.”

One nagging doubt remained: Would he suffer in hell for his actions? Beadle fell back on his religion to find peace of mind. He believed in Deism, a quirky faith that included the beliefs that natural phenomenon, as opposed to miracles or divine revelation, was sufficient to determine the existence of God, and that each individual could know God in his own way without an intermediary or interpretation by organized religion or a religious authority. The Deist also believed that nature runs its course following scientific laws determined by God.

His faith provided him with immunity, Beadle concluded. “I mean to die a proper Deist; I . . . believe that all is right, that we are all impelled to say and act all that we do say and act. That a tyrant king deluging three quarters of the world in blood, that my killing my family, that a man destroying a nest of wasps . . . is as much directed by the hand of heaven as the making this whole world was. And if this is the case, there is no such thing as sin,” he wrote, adding later, “I really believe that the true God supports me.” He imagined when the day came, “I shall do it as deliberately and steadily as I would go to bed.” In his will, he declared: “I and my family shall go off this state martyrs to that cause that I fondly believed to be the cause of justice, virtue and freedom.”

Shortly before Beadle massacred his family, he “rehearsed the murders” in his mind, gazing at his family as they slept, clutching the “means of death” in his hand, he wrote to his friend Chester. His wife was bothered during this time by premonitions of death that came to her in dreams. She saw in her dreams her husband's many papers “spotted with blood,” and her
children lying dead. In another dream, she was seized with a dreadful confusion but then was “free and happy,” wrote Beadle in a letter. He took the vision as a sign that the “hand of heaven is really with us.” Just weeks later, in early December, he killed the family, the morning after a Christmas party. The day before the massacre, he was almost giddy. “Thank heaven, for I believe the day is now come,” he wrote. “This is a glorious one, and providence seems to smile on the deed.” He likely drugged his wife and children and attacked them as they slept. He struck Lydia, and then each of his children, in the head with an ax, then cut their throats. He hung his wife and son's heads over the side of their beds so their blood would not stain the sheets. He arranged his three daughters side by side on the floor of their bedroom, “like lambs,” noted a witness, and covered them with a blanket. Finally, when his family lay dead in his house, Beadle raised two pistols to his head, one in each hand, pressed the muzzle of each into the opposite temples of his head, and fired.

The maid, told that her mistress was ill, had been sent earlier by Beadle with a letter to fetch Dr. Jonas Farnsworth. Troubled by what Beadle had written in the note delivered to him, Farnsworth rushed with another man and Beadle's friend Mitchell to the home. When the maid returned with the three men and opened the door of the children's bedroom, her “horror was so great”
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that she fainted and tumbled backwards down the stairs before the doctor caught her. “Surely a more distressing sight never agonized the human feelings than now present itself,” Mitchell wrote in his book, recalling the shock as the men entered the room. What they saw was “clearly an act of horror no man could have done. It was so disturbing to see these children in such a state of mangled flesh. The floor was swimming in blood.”

The case triggered widespread horror and outrage in the young American republic at the time it occurred, 1783. Beadle's community was so incensed that residents were desperate to punish him, even after his death. His body was shoved through a window of his home, and the bloody knife he used in the murders was tied to his chest. His corpse was pulled, roughly, exposed, on a horse-drawn sled through town and the winter countryside, and dumped in a hole by the Connecticut River. Visitors to the open gravesite continued to desecrate the body.

Beadle's suicidal family annihilation was the second in America in three years, and among a rash of seven in the same time period. The earlier massacre also involved an ax and a religious fervor. James Yates was considered by his neighbors a “sane and pedestrian cottager” until he fatally bludgeoned his wife and four children, and used an ax to hack to death his dog, two horses, and two cows at his Chester County home in Pennsylvania, in an attack similar to Christopher Foster's rampage in Britain some 240 years later.
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Yates told authorities he was following orders from on high, and said aloud in a prayer to God, “My father, for thy glory I have done this deed.”

Another “barbarous” family annihilation 30 years earlier in Pennsylvania by farmer John Myrack in 1750, who bashed his wife, two children, and an infant nursing there, failed to rivet the attention of the community in quite the same way the Beadle murders did. It was written off by the
London Intelligencer
as likely caused by “excessive abuse of mad-making liquor.”
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But the two more “modern” murders sparked painful self-reflection and concerns that something about modern life, or perhaps, modern American life, was linked to the bloodshed. The Beadle and Yates killings followed decades of a troubling increase in criminal violence in the colonies, and a violence that was leaking into the home. Citizens grasped at some explanation for the profoundly disturbing murders. Beadle's “free-thinking” avant-garde religion was held accountable by at least one angry minister, who warned his flock about such an outcome from a “monster Deist” who had turned his back on the Bible and religious authority.

But it couldn't be so simple. A strange miasma continued to infect Americans' sense of themselves in the wake of the child murders so unfathomable that they shook the soul. “Something strange and horrible happened in a number of American households of the early republic,” writes researcher Daniel Cohen.
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“In a series of curiously clustered incidents, spaced over a period of six decades, a handful of men, loving husbands and affectionate fathers, took axes from under their beds and slaughtered their wives and children.” The killings occurred in a variety of regions and involved men from their mid-20s to mid-50s, in various occupations from farmer to craftsman to merchant, in what seems to have “constituted a representative cross-section of American men of the early republic,” Cohen
notes. “What set them apart from their neighbors were a series of appalling crimes.”

This rash of family-annihilation cases after the Revolutionary War marks America as the “birthplace” of modern familicide, believes family-annihilation expert Neil Websdale, a professor at Northern Arizona University. Such murders occurred earlier, according to medieval accounts, but extremely rarely. The face of violent crime centuries ago was largely male-on-male murder, as it is today, and murders within a family constituted a far smaller proportion of total murders than they did in early modern times, according to Websdale. The peculiar and disturbing crime of family annihilation was forged in the last few centuries in the crucible of modern stresses, he's convinced, and it was born in the American republic.

Websdale has conducted the most detailed study of the widest range of family annihilations in in his book
Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers
. He studied the circumstances of each case, examined the background of the killers, and pored over official and media accounts. In a number of the rare cases in which the killer was still alive, he interviewed him (or her). Websdale takes as one of his research launching points Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's views of domestic murder and family annihilation. He acknowledges drawing on their insights, including their view that domestic violence is steeped in the evolutionary drives behind man's sometimes-violent “sexual proprietariness” concerning women, forged by natural selection. “Daly and Wilson's point that biological forces have a major role to play in explaining intimate partner homicide and familicide is an important touchstone,” Websdale notes.
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But he also believes that such theories are inadequate to fully understand the complexity of murderous domestic violence in modern times. “My point is not that these perspectives are incorrect as much as it is that they do not take us far enough,” he writes. While men may be primed for violence in certain situations by evolution, the theory isn't fine-tuned enough to help discern which of the vast population of human males are likely to be the few who kill their wives, children, or their entire family, notes Websdale. He believes researchers must seek out patterns of behavior to more clearly define which kind of men kill families in an effort to develop predictive theories that could be used to prevent future bloodshed.

The cases he studied were complicated. It was apparent that “male perpetrators were powerful in some ways and not in others, and that the relationship between this power and their violence/tyranny was complex,” he writes.
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He concluded that it was not so much male power that led to murderous violence but, rather, fading, or a sense of diminishing, power or the fear of a loss of power that triggered violence.

Websdale argues that a killer's anxiety about his tenuous hold on control in his life is the result of a modern phenomenon of stresses that exacts a particular toll on men. The modern male must respond to a mind-blowing array of mixed signals of behavior and comportment expectations within the demands of a modern economy shaped by history, society, and culture. Today's
Homo sapiens
male is expected to be an aggressive, competitive go-getter, successful at work with an enviable lifestyle. But he must also be a romantic partner and caring father, and always calm and dependable. Few men can find a comfortable spot on a bar set so high, and so are left frustrated and ashamed when they can't deliver what they believe they're expected to do, Websdale believes. Though he studies killers in his book, Websdale says the work is not so much about murder but about “familicidal hearts” in society. He believes the extreme cases of murder-suicide reveal dark pressures of what many people struggle with and their link to the ugliness of family violence. Familicides “tell us a lot about the way we live our lives. The book isn't really about people who kill; it's about the emotional life that informs that tendency to kill,” he explained to me in an interview. “There are a lot more familicidal hearts out there than people who will commit familicide. It never ceases to amaze me how many men are depressed, how many have fantasies about killing their families. That says something profound about the way we live.”