Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (10 page)

The other was an American physician with the imposing name of Valorous P. Coolidge. In contrast to Palmer—believed to have killed as many as fourteen victims—Coolidge committed only a single homicide. But the details of the case were so bizarre that it became one of the greatest crime sensations of the day.

V
ALOROUS
C
OOLIDGE MAY
not have been a psychopath, but he did share another personality trait with William Palmer. He was a profligate spender, perpetually in dire need of cash to support his extravagant ways and ruinous addiction to land speculation. By the time he had reached his mid-twenties, the young physician—widely admired by the citizens of Waterville, Maine, who had no inkling of his financial fecklessness—was smothering under a mountain of debt. For years, he had been borrowing money from one creditor after another, swearing each to secrecy so that the rest would remain unaware of his desperate condition. The public would not learn the sordid truth until his trial, when a parade of witnesses testified to the many loans he had never repaid: $100 each from William Tobey, Warren K. Doe, Robert Drummond, and Daniel Moors; $200 from David Smilie, Augustine Perkins, Isaac Britton, and John R. Philbrick; $500 from Job Richards, Jones A. Goodwin, and Franklin N. Dunbar; and smaller sums from numerous individuals, totaling more than $3,000 in 1840s dollars—equivalent to over $80,000 today.

Eventually, no one in town would risk lending him money, not even on terms that a Mafia loan shark would consider usurious. In the summer of 1847, he approached an acquaintance named George Gilman, proposing to pay him $500 for a three-month loan of $2,000. Gilman refused. A few weeks later, he offered the same exorbitant interest to James F. Gray for a six-month loan of $1,000. Gray also turned him down.

It was then that a sudden opportunity presented itself. Among Coolidge’s patients were the three Matthews brothers, the oldest of whom, Edward, was a successful dealer in cattle. In early September, Coolidge learned that Matthews expected to realize $1,800 from the sale of a small herd of cattle he was planning to drive to the village of Brighton, forty miles away. Inviting Matthews over to his office, Coolidge made the drover an offer he couldn’t refuse: $400 in interest for a ten-day loan of $1,500. The two men sealed the deal with a handshake and a glass of the brandy Coolidge kept on the shelf for medicinal uses.

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
16, Matthews set off with his drove for Brighton. The following day, Coolidge sent a letter to Joseph Burnett, a Boston apothecary, putting in an order for various items. Along with an “abdominal supporter,” one pound of “Zinc
Muriate Iron,” two ounces of “Sulphate Quinine,” and “any new preparation that will be worthy of trial,” he requested one ounce of hydrocyanic acid, “as strong as it can be.”

A colorless, transparent liquid with a pungent, acrid taste that (in the words of one standard chemistry manual) “is easily concealed in medicine or alcoholic beverages,” hydrocyanic acid (also known as prussic acid) is an exceptionally deadly and fast-acting poison. In the Victorian era, when medications contained everything from strychnine to arsenic, it was used in extremely diluted form for the treatment of stomach cramps, heart palpitations, and “nervous irritation,” among other ailments. A lethal dose was known to cause almost instantaneous death. Tests on dogs and other small animals that evidently died in great distress when poisoned with the substance had led to the belief that “death from prussic acid is always preceded by a shriek.” Observation of human victims, however, had shown that “death comes in a placid manner, the patient passing away without a struggle.”

Two days after mailing his order to Joseph Burnett, Dr. Coolidge sent a letter to another apothecary, Benjamin Wales of Hallowell, Maine. “Dear Sir,” he wrote. “Will you send me one ounce of the strong Hydrocyanic acid as strong as it is made? If have not the strongest, send as strong as you have.”

O
N
T
HURSDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
23, Coolidge showed up at the Parker House—the hotel where Edward Matthews boarded when he was in town—and asked the bartender, George Robinson, to notify him as soon as the drover got back from Brighton. Matthews returned to Waterville on Saturday the twenty-fifth but, despite the barkeep’s promise, a few days went by before he got a message to Coolidge. By then, the drover had deposited the full proceeds from his cattle sale—$1,800—in the Taconic Bank.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY AFTERNOON
, September 29, Mr. Elbridge Getchell was strolling along the main street of Waterville when he encountered Edward Matthews outside Phillips’ General Store. The two men had been conversing for a few minutes when Dr. Coolidge strode up and told Matthews that he wished to see him. Excusing himself, Matthews turned and (as Getchell later testified) “went in the direction of Dr. Coolidge’s office, in which direction also the doctor had gone a few minutes before.”

Not long afterward, Benjamin Ayer arrived at Coolidge’s office for a consultation.
As he sat in the waiting room, the door to the rear office opened and out stepped the physician and Edward Matthews. Coolidge escorted Matthews to the front door, where the two men paused to converse in hushed tones. As Matthews opened the door to leave, Ayer heard Coolidge say something like “keep dark.” Though he couldn’t quite make out the words, he had the distinct impression that, as he later put it, the doctor was “enjoining Matthews to secrecy.”

S
OMETIME IN THE
middle of Thursday afternoon, September 30, Charles Matthews was behind the counter of his bookstore when he received a visit from his brother Edward. Moments later, a messenger boy arrived with a note for Edward. As Edward extracted it from the envelope and began to read, Charles glanced over his shoulder. “Come to the office this evening and arrange that business, but reveal it not for your life,” it said. Though the note was unsigned, Charles had no trouble recognizing the handwriting, having seen it many times before on prescriptions written for him by Dr. Coolidge.

No sooner had Edward finished the letter than he excused himself and proceeded to the Taconic Bank, where he withdrew $1,500 from his account.

C
HARLES
M
ATTHEWS
was with his brother again that evening at the Parker House. “We were together at a small party there,” he later testified. At around 8:00 p.m., Edward, after checking the time on his gold pocket watch, “said he supposed it was time for him to be going to Dr. Coolidge’s office.” He then rose from the table and left.

“And that,” Charles Matthews said afterward, “was the last I ever saw of him.”

A
FEW HOURS
earlier, at around 6:00 p.m., Timothy Flint, a twenty-four-year-old student of Coolidge’s, entered the doctor’s office and found him in a “nervous state.” Coolidge explained that a fellow named Stackpole—a shady individual who, among other questionable enterprises, supplied contraband cadavers to anatomy schools—had promised him a fresh “subject” for dissection. He planned to deliver it at around eight o’clock. Because Stackpole was naturally skittish about his dealings, Coolidge wanted Flint to leave before he showed up.

Sure enough, at a few minutes past eight, someone knocked on the front door. Assuming
it was the corpse dealer, Flint exited through the rear of the office and returned to his boardinghouse, where he sat down in the parlor and invited the proprietor’s comely daughter, Emily Williams, to join him in a game of backgammon.

About an hour later, Flint bid Miss Williams good night, took a lamp, and headed for his room. As he made his way along the shadowy hallway, he was startled to see a figure lurking outside his door. Coming closer, he saw that it was Dr. Coolidge, who immediately grabbed him by the arm and commanded the young medical student to accompany him to his office at once.

As soon as they entered, Coolidge locked the door behind them and, speaking in a low, urgent voice, said: “Charles, I am going to reveal to you a secret which involves my life.” He then proceeded to explain that, a short time earlier, “that cursed little Edward Matthews came in here and wanted a brandy and fell down dead. He now lies in the other room.” Not wishing to be held responsible for the drover’s death, Coolidge had “thumped him on the head” to make it appear that Matthews had fallen victim to “the hand of violence on the street.”

As Flint struggled to absorb this dumbfounding news, Coolidge asked, “What do you think we should do with him?”

“I don’t know,” Flint stammered in reply.

“We must get him out of the office,” Coolidge said firmly. “I wish we could throw him in the river.”

Flint—who by that point had regained a measure of self-possession—pointed out that, given the brightness of the moonlight and the distance to the river, they would surely be spotted. He raised the same objection when Coolidge proposed depositing the body in “a place back of the building.”

“We cannot safely carry the body farther than the cellar,” Flint declared. “That’s as far as I will go.”

Though Coolidge protested that sticking the body in the cellar guaranteed that it “would be found by seven o’clock the next morning” when the janitor arrived, Flint was adamant. Oil lamp in hand, Coolidge led the way into the rear office. There on the floor between a counter and a back window lay Edward Matthews’ corpse, blood pooling from three ghastly wounds on its head, evidently made by a hatchet.

The sight seemed to unnerve Coolidge. “I think it’s best to put something around the head,” he said. Kneeling, he retrieved Matthews’ hat, which lay a few feet away, and jammed it over the mutilated head, so far down that it almost covered the dead
man’s eyes. Then, with Flint grasping the corpse under its stiffening arms and Coolidge holding it by the ankles, they wrestled it down the stairs and deposited it next to a woodpile near the outside cellar door.

Back upstairs in the office, Coolidge used a towel to wipe up the blood from the floor. When he was satisfied, he turned to Flint and asked “what it was best to do.”

“Just go on with your business,” said the medical student, who suddenly found himself playing counselor to his shaken master. “Let the matter come out as it will.”

Promising to return first thing in the morning, Flint then turned to leave. As he did, Coolidge barked out a semihysterical laugh. “They can’t suspect me, can they?” he cried. “No, it’s impossible. My popularity is too great!”

A
S
C
OOLIDGE EXPECTED
, the murder was discovered early the next morning when the building janitor, Joseph Hasty, arrived at seven o’clock and found the “body resting on a pile of wood, its head bearing marks of repeated violent blows and pockets rifled of money and gold watch.” A coroner’s jury was immediately summoned and an autopsy performed by the killer himself, assisted by two other local physicians, Drs. Thayer and Plaisted.

Removing the stomach, Coolidge emptied its contents into a washbasin, which immediately gave off a strong stink of brandy. Turning to a witness, Cyrus Williams, Coolidge—clearly hoping to get rid of any incriminating evidence—told him to take the basin outside and throw the contents away “as they might smell up the room.” Dr. Thayer, however, intervened. Insisting that the stomach matter would require further analysis, he instructed Williams to lock up the basin in an icehouse for preservation. As Williams carried the bowl out of the room, Coolidge, seemingly by accident, jostled him. Williams, however, managed to keep hold of the receptacle and deposit it in the icehouse, where it remained overnight. Early the following morning, Saturday, October 2, it was conveyed to the offices of a chemistry professor named Loomis.

Though Loomis, as he would later testify, had never attended medical school, he “had considerable experience in morbid anatomy” and knew something about the effects of prussic acid, having conducted a recent experiment in which he took a 50 percent solution of the poison and “put a drop into the eye of a cat, producing death in ten seconds.” Analyzing the half-digested matter removed from Edward Matthews’ stomach, Loomis found that it “exhibited the unmistakable presence of prussic acid.”
Further tests on the liver, lungs, spleen and brain similarly “indicated the action of prussic acid.”

In spite of his confident prediction to Flint, Coolidge immediately fell under suspicion. He was arrested on Monday, October 4, when Matthews’ gold watch was found concealed in the physician’s sleigh, wrapped in white paper matching the kind Coolidge used for his correspondence. He was promptly arrested and indicted on four counts of first-degree murder.

So many people showed up for the opening of his trial on March 14, 1848, that the county courthouse in Augusta could not accommodate the crowds. The proceedings were immediately adjourned to South Congregational Church, capable of seating fifteen hundred people. As soon as the doors were thrown open, it was filled within minutes, “the galleries principally with ladies.”

After a week of testimony—highlighted by Flint’s devastating revelations—the jury took less than a day to return a guilty verdict. The prisoner was sentenced, as per Maine law, “to be hanged after the expiration of a year spent in hard labor.” Confined in an unheated, windowless cell measuring eight by four feet in the Thomaston State Prison, Coolidge cheated the hangman by committing suicide on May 18, 1849.