Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (47 page)

William Hickman handcuffed to Detective Raymond of the LAPD. (©
Bettmann/Corbis. Used by permission
.)

Hickman drove her back to the Bellevue Arms and smuggled her into his apartment, where she promptly fell asleep on the couch while he retired to his bedroom. He awoke the next morning to find the little girl sobbing. He consoled her by “telling her that she could write a letter to her father and that I would also.” After going out to post the letters, he returned with the newspapers. Tickled by her newfound celebrity, she kept “looking at her picture and reading the accounts of her abduction.”

When she complained about feeling cooped up, Hickman “promised to go out driving again.” Leaving around noon, they drove all the way out to San Juan Capistrano. On the way back, Hickman stopped to place several phone calls to Perry Parker and arrange for the ransom payment. After spotting the police trap, however, Hickman had headed back to the Bellevue Apartments. “Marian sobbed a little because she couldn’t go home that night, but she saw everything and was content to wait till the next morning.”

The next day, Hickman had Marian “write to her father that he must not try to
trap me or something might happen to her.” Though she was aware that in his own letters to her father Hickman had threatened to kill her, she didn’t take the threats seriously. “She knew I didn’t mean it and was not worried or excited about it,” said Hickman. “In fact, I promised Marian that even though her father didn’t pay me the money, I would let her go back unharmed. She felt perfectly safe.”

When Hickman made that promise on Saturday morning, December 17, he was entirely sincere. It took him by surprise, therefore, when, as he was on his way out to mail another letter to Perry Parker, he was “completely gripped” by the “intention to murder.” Grabbing a dish towel from the kitchen, he returned to Marian, who was tied to a chair, then “gently placed the towel about her neck and explained that it might rest her head.” Before she “had time to doubt or even say anything,” Hickman “pulled the towel about her throat and applied all my strength to the move. She made no audible noise except for the struggle and heaving of her body during the period of strangulation, which continued for about two minutes.”

His exertions having left him somewhat sweaty and disheveled, Hickman washed his face, combed his hair, and straightened his clothing. He then left the building and proceeded to the nearest drugstore, where he purchased rouge, lipstick, and face powder, explaining to the salesgirl that he was purchasing the cosmetics for his sister. Back in the apartment, he set about dismembering the child’s corpse for easy disposal, applying the techniques he had learned back in Kansas City while working in the poultry house.

Stripping the body, he carried it into the bathroom and laid it facedown in the tub, head over the drain. He then slit the girl’s throat with a butcher knife, turned on the water, and returned to the kitchen for a snack of sardines and crackers while the blood drained from the carcass.

Returning to the bathroom, he stripped down to his undershorts and went to work on the body with a set of “improvised surgical instruments”—the butcher knife, a pocket knife, a kitchen fork, an icepick, and a package of razors. He began (in the words of Hickman’s defense lawyer, Richard Cantillon, who would go on to write a powerful account of the case) by effecting “a disjunction from the body of the arms at the elbows and the legs at the knees. Then he cut an opening in the abdomen, removing the viscera. The odor from the entrails made him sick to his stomach and he vomited into the toilet bowl.”

After standing by an open window in the living room until his “stomach settled
down,” he returned to the bathroom and wrapped the viscera in a “thick newspaper bundle.” He then went back to butchering the body. As he sawed through the backbone,

After wrapping the severed limbs in newspapers, Hickman thoroughly scrubbed the bathroom floor, washed out the tub, and took a warm bath. Once he was dressed, he “picked up the cosmetics and with the ineptitude of an amateur beautician, applied the rouge, lipstick, and face powder to the dead face. He slipped her school dress over the head and torso, carefully pinning it so it would remain in place and cover the wound on the throat.” As a final touch, he sewed open her eyelids with two fine strands of picture wire, “brushed and fixed Marian’s hair in a ponytail, held in place with her hair ribbon, tied in a neat bow.

“The entire effect,” observes Cantillon, “was quite lifelike.”

H
ICKMAN’S THIRTEEN-DAY TRIAL
, which opened on January 25, 1928, drew hordes of curiosity seekers, including a few Hollywood celebrities. Roughly one hundred journalists were also in attendance, among them Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, who had been hired by the Los Angeles Examiner to cover the proceedings and whose controversial commentary was syndicated in Hearst newspapers across the country. A devotee of the dangerously crackpot theory of eugenics—the belief that the human species can be improved by eliminating genetic undesirables—Burroughs saw Hickman as a type of “instinctive criminal,” a born “moral imbecile” whose execution
would remove “a potential menace to the peace and happiness of countless future generations, for moral imbeciles breed moral imbeciles, criminals breed criminals, murderers breed murderers just as truly as St. Bernards breed St. Bernards.” In Burroughs’ view, the psychiatrists who testified that Hickman was insane were even crazier than the defendant.

In the end, the jury shared his opinion of Hickman’s mental state, finding him guilty of first-degree murder after deliberating for all of forty-three minutes. Days later, in a separate trial, Hickman and Welby Hunt were found guilty of murdering pharmacist Clarence Thoms during the drugstore holdup in December 1926.

Hickman spent eight months on San Quentin’s death row while his appeals made their way through the courts. During that time, he converted to Catholicism and—proclaiming himself a “contrite and humble sinner”—wrote apologetic notes to his victims’ families.

His hanging, on October 19, 1928, was a grisly affair. As he plunged through the trap, his head struck the side of the gallows. Instead of dying cleanly with a snapped neck, he “hung there, violently twitching and jerking” as he slowly strangled to death. The spectacle was so ghastly that three witnesses fainted, “toppling from their wooden chairs.”

A
S EVERYONE KNOWS, FAIRY TALES ARE FULL OF WICKED STEPMOTHERS, FROM THE
black-hearted shrew of “Cinderella,” who treats the title character like a galley slave, to the wicked queen of “Snow White,” who plots against the young heroine’s life, and the greedy wife of “Hansel and Gretel,” who persuades her weak-willed husband to abandon the two siblings in the forest. Perhaps scariest of all is the villainess of “The Juniper Tree,” who—after decapitating her stepson with the heavy lid of an iron chest—chops up his body, bakes it into a meat pie, and feeds it to his father.

Of course—as psychoanalytic critics assure us—these nightmarish creatures are figures of pure infantile fantasy, rooted in childhood fears of maternal rejection. Such monsters, they argue, couldn’t possibly exist outside the pages of the Brothers Grimm. Unfortunately, criminal history proves otherwise. As the 1930 case of Pearl O’Loughlin demonstrates, fairy tales really can come true. And not in a good way.

A
T THE HEIGHT
of her notoriety, when accounts of her crime dominated the regional newspapers, one eminent psychologist diagnosed Pearl O’Loughlin with the same character flaw that afflicted the evil queen in “Snow White”: “overweening vanity.” And it is certainly true that the thirty-one-year-old wife and mother took inordinate pride in her
Character analysis of murderess Pearl O’Loughlin appearance and the impression it made on others. A tall and slender redhead with big dark eyes and a brilliant smile, she was—as one contemporary reported—“famous in her Denver neighborhood for her good looks.”

Character analysis of murderess Pearl O’Loughlin (©
Stanley B. Burns, M.D. and The Burns Archive. Used by permission.
)

She and her eight-year-old son, Douglas—the offspring of her failed first marriage—had moved into the neighborhood in January 1929 when she wed for a second time. Her new husband, city detective Leo O’Loughlin—“one of the ace sleuths of the Denver police department”—had his own child from an earlier marriage, a pretty, blue-eyed ten-year-old named Leona. The four lived in a modest house on Tremont
Street, which they shared with Leo’s bachelor brother, Frank.