Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (28 page)

Apparently her brother had stood paralyzed for a few moments with terror. When he finally turned to run, it was too late. He was found lying facedown, having evidently tripped over a tree root while attempting to escape. His killer had pounced on the prostrate boy and stabbed him through the back a half dozen times. The wounds were so deep that, in several instances, the blade had gone all the way through the little victim’s body, coming out the skin in front.

There were two houses within a few hundred yards of the scene. But the inhabitants were so accustomed to shouts, laughter, and yells from picnic and excursion groups that, as the newspapers noted, “they would not have paid any attention even if they had heard screams on this occasion.”

The appalling savagery of the Joyce murders provoked a statewide furor. From their pulpits, ministers decried the murders as a sign of the growing degeneracy of the age—of the country’s deplorable descent into vice, immorality and crime. Rewards totaling $4,500 (more than $60,000 in today’s money) were offered by the citizens of Roxbury, while an enormous manhunt was mounted for the “inhuman wretch” responsible for the outrage. Newspapers issued confident pronouncements that the perpetrator of the diabolical deed would be “speedily arrested” and “subjected to summary vengeance.” But, though various suspects were interrogated in the immediate aftermath of the crime, no arrests were made.

The case appeared to be broken in March 1866 when an inmate of the Charlestown State Prison, a small-time crook who went by the colorful name of “Scratch Gravel,” told a cellmate that he had “done that job in Roxbury.” In the end, however, Gravel was judged to be nothing more than a “blustering braggart” who had not even been in Massachusetts at the time of the killings. As the months and years passed with no arrests in the case, it seemed that the murder of the Joyce children—“one of the most horrible and revolting crimes which has ever occurred in New England,” as the
New York Times
described it—would forever go unsolved.

E
ARLY IN THE
summer of 1872, seven years after the murder of the Joyce children, Franklin Evans came to board with his elderly sister, Mrs. Deborah Day, at her farmhouse in Northwood, New Hampshire.

A gaunt and grizzled sixty-four-year-old, Evans had led a shiftless existence for much of his adult life. “He belonged,” wrote one contemporary chronicler, “to that numerous class of dead beats that are always broke.” Wandering the New England countryside, he subsisted by sponging off his adult children, borrowing (though rarely repaying) small sums from acquaintances, and begging handouts from strangers.

What little honest money he made came from supplying a Manchester physician, Dr. F. W. Hanson, with healing roots and herbs. His vagabond life had given the old
man an intimate knowledge of the landscape, and “his reputation for obtaining the medicinal products of the woods and fields was unsurpassed.” Even in this enterprise, however, Evans could not keep from betraying his mendacious nature. Claiming that he himself was a “botanical physician,” he peddled worthless “miracle cures” to rural families desperate for medical aid.

He also passed himself off as an itinerant preacher. Exploiting the religious fervor of the age, he joined the Second Advent Society, declared himself a minister of the Gospel, and managed to raise money from his brethren to support himself in his mission. He was “denounced as a mean, sneaking hypocrite,” however, when he was arrested for consorting with prostitutes. The incident wasn’t his only brush with the law. At various times, he was charged with petty theft, attempting to pass crudely forged ten-dollar bills, and—most serious—scheming to defraud the Travelers Insurance Company of Boston of $1,500.

If these crimes were the sum of his transgressions, Evans would have been nothing more than a small-time scoundrel, a snake oil salesman and confidence trickster on the order of Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin. But as the world would eventually learn to its horror, he was something far worse: a creature so depraved that, to his contemporaries, his crimes seemed the work of supernatural evil—“too horrible,” as one newspaper put it, “for anything in human form to have perpetrated.”

Four people resided at his sister’s farmhouse when Evans showed up that summer:
Mrs. Day and her husband, Sylvester; their widowed daughter, Susan Lovering; and Susan’s daughter, Georgianna. A blooming thirteen-year-old, tall and “well developed for her age,” Georgianna—Evans’ grandniece—immediately became the object of the depraved old man’s lust. Within days of his arrival, he had set about trying to seduce the girl. When she repulsed his odious advances, he concocted a diabolical scheme—a “deeply laid plan,” as one account put it, “designed for no other purpose than to lure his victim into his lecherous grasp.”

Not far from the Day farmhouse lay a deep forest, the largest tract of woodland in the county, covering an area of nearly two thousand acres. Late on Monday, October 21, 1872, after being absent for much of the day, Evans returned to his sister’s home, explaining that he had been off in the forest setting snares for partridges. The following morning, he invited his niece to accompany him into the woods to see if he had caught anything. The traps turned out to be empty. He showed Georgianna how they worked—little hoops concealed inside the hedges, designed to snag the birds by the throat as they scrambled through the foliage. Georgianna was intrigued by the cunning little traps, never suspecting, of course, that they had been placed there to snare
her
.

Early Friday morning, October 25, Evans asked his grandniece for a favor. He had agreed to perform some chores for a neighbor, a farmer named Daniel Hill, and would be gone all day. Would she go into the forest and check the bird snares for him? Surely he must have caught something by now.

Though the girl was reluctant at first, she allowed herself to be persuaded. Evans left soon afterward, presumably for Hill’s farm several miles away. A short time later, Georgianna stuck a comb in her thick brown hair to hold it in place, threw on a shawl, tied on her bonnet and—like Little Red Riding Hood off to visit Grandma—disappeared into the forest.

W
HEN
G
EORGIANNA FAILED
to return by lunchtime, her grandfather went out to look for her. Unable to find her, he came back home and told her mother, who immediately became alarmed. The two hurried back to the woods. As they made their way through the forest, shouting the girl’s name, they spotted her apron caught on a tree branch. A short distance away, they came upon her comb, broken in half, with some strands of her hair stuck in the teeth. The soft earth all around was trampled with two sets of prints, one made by a man’s boots, the other by a girl’s shoes—evidence, as Grandpa
Day would later testify, of a “squabble.” Frantic with anxiety, Day and his daughter pushed ever deeper into the woods but could turn up no other trace of the missing girl.

Racing back home, they alerted the neighbors. All day Saturday and into Sunday morning, hundreds of people scoured the woods, but to no avail. By then, suspicion had fallen on Franklin Evans. Checking with Daniel Hill, authorities discovered that, contrary to Evans’ claim, he hadn’t gone to Hill’s farm that day—in fact, Hill hadn’t seen him for a week. Another witness, a young man named James Pender, testified that he had seen Evans cross into the forest at around eight-thirty on Friday morning, just a half hour before Georgianna herself disappeared into the woods.

When Evans, under intense questioning by County Sheriff Henry Drew, could offer no convincing account of his whereabouts on the day his grandniece went missing, he was taken into custody. Inside his pockets, Drew (as he later testified) found “a wallet, money, obscene books, a bottle of liquor, and a common bone-handled knife with two blades, blood-stained and keen as a razor.”

At first Evans denied all knowledge of Georgianna’s whereabouts. When Drew assured the old man that “no harm would come to him if he would confess,” Evans changed his story. Georgianna, he insisted, was alive and well. He had arranged to have her “carried away by a man from Kingston,” a farmer named Webster, who wanted her as his bride.

Though Drew was skeptical, he immediately started for Kingston, where he confirmed that the story was a “base falsehood.” Back at the jailhouse, he continued to press Evans, plying him with liquor and promising to help him escape to Canada if he told the truth. Finally, on Halloween night, the old man gave in. Asked by Drew “whether the girl was cold in death or not,” Evans replied, “She is, and I’ve done wrong.”

“With this admission, on Thursday, about midnight, six days after her disappearance,” writes one contemporary chronicler, “Evans told the Sheriff he would go with him and show where the girl was. Through the dark forest at midnight they silently pursued their way, over rocks and decayed logs, through swamps and glades, and there, in the recess of this deep wood, beneath the roots of an upturned tree, this worse-than-criminal pointed to a pile of dried leaves and coolly said, ‘There she is.’ The Sheriff gently moved away the leaves and by the dim light of his lantern were revealed the mangled remains of Georgianna Lovering.”

By then, two other townsmen, Eben J. Parsley and Alonzo Tuttle, had arrived on
the scene, followed closely by the local physician, Dr. Caleb Hanson. Gaping in shock at the naked, savaged girl, Parsley asked Evans: “How did you come to do such a bloody deed?”

The old man shrugged and replied, “I suppose the evil one got the upper hand of me.”

A glance at the girl’s face, with its bulging eyes, swollen and protruding tongue, and dark bruises around the windpipe, told Hanson that she had been strangled. Her body had been hideously mutilated. Evans, as he later confessed, had raped the corpse, then torn open the belly with his jackknife to get at her uterus. He had also excised her vulva, which he carried off some distance and hid under a rock. When a stunned Sheriff Drew asked Evans why he had committed such butchery, the old man calmly explained that he “did it to gain some knowledge of the human system that might be of use to me as a doctor.”

As he led Evans back to the jail, Drew had one more question for him. “What did you set those snares for, Frank?”

If the sheriff had any doubts that he was in the presence of some unaccountable evil, they vanished with the old man’s response.

“I set them to catch the girl,” said her uncle with a self-satisfied smirk, “and I catched her.”

F
RANKLIN
E
VANS’ TRIAL,
which opened on February 3, 1873, was a perfunctory affair, its outcome a forgone conclusion. Only one moment of drama occurred during its three-day duration. Early on the morning of Tuesday, February 5, while his keeper was off fetching him a glass of water, the old man took one of his suspenders, tied it around his neck, attached the other end to a clothes hook nailed to the wall, and tried to hang himself. Just then, as newspapers reported, the keeper returned, “seized Evans, and disengaged him from the hook.”

The halfhearted nature of this suicide attempt convinced most observers that Evans—hoping to get off on an insanity defense—was merely trying to convince the jurors of his mental instability. If so, the effort failed. He was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be hanged for real on the third Tuesday of February 1874. For “his unnamable and incredible crimes, he will be swung like a dog,” exulted one local newspaper, which went on to recommend that those wishing to attend the
hanging should make “early application in order to secure ‘reserved seats,’ which will be scarce.”

Accompanied by the high sheriff of Rockingham County, J. W. Odlin, Evans was transported by train to the state prison at Concord. A crowd of more than eight hundred gawkers, “excited to a remarkable pitch of feeling,” gathered at the station to catch of glimpse of him. Their frenzied fascination was not entirely based on Evans’ notoriety as the slayer of Georgianna Lovering. By then, he had confessed to other crimes as well—atrocities that marked him as one of the most appalling killers of the age, a monster whose like would not be seen again in this country for another fifty years, when the pedophiliac madman Albert Fish prowled the land.

E
VANS
’ “
INCONCEIVABLE CAREER OF CRIME
” had begun fifteen years earlier, during a visit to Derry, New Hampshire. Passing by the dwelling of a family named Mills, he peered through a window and spotted a little girl, approximately five years old, playing on the floor. No adults were to be seen. Possessed by the urge “to procure a body to examine for surgical purposes” (in his words), he snuck into the house, snatched the child, then “took her to the woods at some distance and strangled her.” When he stripped off her clothes, however, he discovered that “one hip and part of her spine were deformed.” Seized with revulsion, he abandoned his plan to “examine her”—his euphemism for postmortem rape and sexual mutilation—and buried the corpse beneath a rotten chestnut stump.

Three years later, while staying in Augusta, Maine, he waylaid a fourteen-year-old named Anna Sibley on her way to school. Carrying her deep into the woods, he raped her, cut her throat, then hid her corpse beneath a pile of leaves. In May 1872, just weeks before arriving at his sister’s home in Northwood, Evans also raped and murdered a woman whose body was found in the woods near Fitchburg, Massachusetts.