Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (48 page)

The union of Leo and Pearl was troubled from the start. Within months of their wedding, they were already quarreling so bitterly that on at least three occasions, Pearl—screaming threats of divorce—stormed out of the house with Douglas in tow and didn’t come back for several days.

She also had problems with her brother-in-law, Frank. After one particularly nasty argument between them, a mysterious fire broke out in Frank’s bedroom closet, scorching much of his clothing. Though Pearl professed innocence—the garments, she claimed, had burst into flame as a result of “spontaneous combustion”—Frank would have nothing more to do with her and stopped taking his meals with the family.

On the evening of Tuesday, October 14, 1930, during a relatively tranquil time in the household, Pearl prepared a special supper for Leo and the children. Precisely what she served is a matter of dispute. Some accounts describe the main dish as lamb chops, others as fish. All agree, however, that it was accompanied by roasted potatoes,
plus a big bowl of rice that Pearl carefully placed on the table between her husband and stepdaughter.

Leo, a strapping six-footer, helped himself to two heaping mounds of the rice. At Pearl’s urging, little Leona also ate a hearty portion. When Douglas, however—after polishing off his meat and potatoes—held out his plate for some rice, his mother declared that he had eaten enough and refused to serve him any. She herself did not touch the rice.

Shortly after dinner, at approximately 6:50 p.m., Leo—who’d been assigned to the night shift—left for central headquarters. He got home around midnight, slept fitfully, and awoke with what felt like a bout of food poisoning. Despite the cramps and nausea, he headed to work around 7:00 a.m. By midmorning, however, he was feeling so ill that he returned home.

No sooner had he walked in the door than Pearl informed him that something worrisome had happened. Leona was nowhere to be found. Normally, the little girl arose, ate a solid breakfast, bid her stepmother goodbye, then went off to school in the company of her friend Betty Scott, who lived across the street. That morning, however, Pearl had not seen Leona at all.

Though not excessively alarmed, Leo was concerned. His daughter was a creature of habit, not the kind to dash off on an empty stomach or without a word of goodbye. Fighting back his sickness, he telephoned the Cathedral School and asked if Leona was there. The nun who answered told him to hold while she checked. She was back in a few moments with unsettling news. The little girl had not appeared in class that morning.

Putting in a call to Betty Scott’s parents, Leo learned that, after waiting as long as possible for Leona, Betty had gone off to school by herself that morning. His anxieties intensifying by the moment, he telephoned around the neighborhood. No one had seen his daughter.

By then, Leo was seriously worried. True, children sometimes ran away from home in a snit. But as far as he knew, Leona had been in a perfectly happy mood.

Sick as he felt, Leo rushed back to headquarters, where he informed his superior, Captain Albert Clark, that his daughter was missing. Though Clark believed there was no cause for panic—perhaps, he suggested, the child was just playing hooky—he ordered his dispatchers to spread the word about Leona.

It wasn’t long before one of Leo’s colleagues, a detective named Clarence Jones,
called in with a disturbing report. Going from door to door in the O’Loughlins’ neighborhood, he had come upon a fellow named Amos Johnson, who testified that while lying awake the previous night, he had heard a “muffled scream,” followed immediately by the “racing hum of an automobile.” The noises, said Johnson, had come from the direction of the O’Loughlin home.

For Captain Clark, Johnson’s testimony put a much more serious complexion on the case. The previous decade had witnessed a rash of high-profile child abductions (a terrifying trend that would culminate in 1932 with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping). It now seemed as if Leona O’Loughlin might have been snatched from her home—perhaps by someone with a grudge against her policeman father.

Clark immediately contacted the police identification bureau and requested a list of all offenders arrested by O’Loughlin within the past few years. At the same time, he put out a general alarm that swiftly mobilized officers from law enforcement agencies across the state.

One person, however, was unable to assist in the search. By midafternoon, Leo O’Loughlin’s intestinal sufferings had become so acute that he’d been forced to return home, where he lay moaning in bed, racked with abdominal pain.

T
HE DISAPPEARANCE OF
Detective O’Loughlin’s ten-year-old daughter—followed by his own mysterious collapse—was front-page news by the next day. Like all such highly publicized stories, this one brought a deluge of imaginary sightings, false leads, and wild reports. “Leona was seen in this mountain town and that,” wrote crime reporter Ray Humphreys. “She was captive of a gypsy band in Southern Colorado; she had been spirited away by killers of the Leopold-Loeb type; she was ‘spotted’ in Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Utah.” Psychics, fortune-tellers, and the usual assortment of cranks kept the police switchboard lit up with a variety of crackpot solutions.

One presumably reliable witness, a National Guardsman named C. I. Mosier, swore he’d seen the bound and gagged little girl in the back of a gray Ford roadster zooming down a road near Golden, Colorado. The car, Mosier reported, had Arizona plates and was driven by “a male about twenty-three years old, six feet tall, weighing about 135 pounds, with dark hair and a swarthy complexion.” Acting on the tip, state troopers managed to track down the suspected vehicle, only to discover that the supposedly
trussed-up child in the backseat was actually a small pile of suitcases with a white sweater tossed over it.

In the meantime, Leo’s health had been steadily deteriorating. By Friday morning, his condition was so dire that he was rushed by ambulance to St. Joseph’s Hospital. He was still being examined by the admitting physicians when his missing daughter was finally found.

It was a grocer named William McLeod who made the discovery. McLeod, who worked near Berkeley Park in the northwest section of Denver, was out for an afternoon stroll by the lake when he spotted a small body, garbed in a schoolgirl uniform, floating facedown in the water. He phoned police headquarters immediately. Within minutes, a small fleet of vehicles—including a squad car, an ambulance, a fire department rescue truck, and an automobile carrying the coroner, George Bostwick—were racing to the scene. No sooner had they arrived than the body was fished from the water and positively identified as Detective O’Loughlin’s daughter.

Bostwick’s preliminary examination indicated that the girl had not drowned. She had apparently been beaten on the head with a blunt instrument, then suffocated to death before being dumped in the lake.

Leo was in such bad shape that the doctors thought it best to withhold the news from him. Pearl was the first to be informed. Escorted to headquarters, she was ushered into the office of a grim-faced Captain Clark, who told her that her stepdaughter had been located.

“Oh, is she dead?” Pearl responded.

Clark confirmed that the child’s corpse had been found in Berkeley Park Lake.

“Poor little dear,” said Pearl.

Despite her weirdly blasé reaction, suspicion did not immediately alight upon Pearl. Clark still held to the belief that the child had been killed by one of Leo’s gangland enemies. He began to change his mind when the full autopsy results came in. An analysis of the contents of Leona’s stomach revealed that the little girl had ingested several spoonfuls of ground glass on the night of her death.

Almost simultaneously, Clark received a startling report from the hospital, where Leo lay alive and suffering. In an effort to determine the cause of Leo’s illness, his stomach had been pumped. It, too, contained a quantity of ground glass.

Questioned from his hospital bed, Leon recalled that, at dinner on Tuesday evening, he and his daughter had been the only ones to eat rice. Very quickly the murder
investigation shifted focus from the hypothetical kidnapper to the person who’d prepared the meal—Pearl.

A search of the O’Loughlins’ kitchen turned up particles of crushed glass scattered on the floor beneath the sink. In the trunk of the O’Loughlin car, police also found a tire iron stained with what appeared to be dried blood. A few strands of soft blond hair, matching Leona’s in length and color, were stuck to the clot.

Brought back to police headquarters for protracted questioning, Pearl put on such a convincing display of wounded innocence that even Captain Clark began to doubt his suspicions. Then David O’Loughlin, Leo’s seventy-four-year-old father, showed up.

Six weeks earlier—so the old man related—Leo, Pearl, and the kids came to his Fort Collins home for Sunday dinner. After they left, David, who liked to satisfy his sweet tooth with a few spoonfuls of granulated sugar, took some from his bowl. As soon as he put it in his mouth, he knew something was wrong. It was as if, he told police, “someone had put sand” in it. Curious, he took another spoonful and stirred it into a cup of warm water.

“Some of it didn’t dissolve,” he said, “and when I looked at this closely, I saw it was glass—pounded up, ground glass, maybe—and not sand.”

Hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery, David had not disposed of the adulterated sugar. Retrieving it from his home, police turned it over to a chemist, who confirmed that the substance was a mixture of sugar and coarsely ground glass.

And there was more. Pearl’s own sister, Marybelle, came forward to testify that on the evening of October 10, Pearl had dropped by her home with some food scraps for Marybelle’s pets—a cat and a dog. Later that night, the cat went into convulsions and died. The dog, also stricken, expired two days later. Curious, the family vet performed a postmortem on the dog and discovered ground glass in its viscera.

Despite her continuing protestations of innocence, Pearl was taken into custody and held without bail. Her reaction to the arrest was revealing. Most people in such distressing circumstances would respond with anger, fear, or outrage. By contrast, Pearl—displaying the kind of extreme narcissism characteristic of psychopathic personalities—was primarily concerned with her appearance.

“I want the pink dress that goes with the pink coat I wore when I came down here,” she told Captain Clark from her cell on the morning after her arrest. “I want some silk nightgowns because I could never get used to the one furnished by the city.
Above all, I want my vanity case with powder, rouge, mascara and lipstick. You’ll find it in the upper drawer of the dresser in my room at home.”

In an effort to wrest a confession from her, authorities resorted to various tactics. Shortly after her arrest, for example, she was brought to the city morgue and interrogated in full view of Leona’s corpse—a gambit that elicited a few crocodile tears from Pearl but no admission of guilt. Police also planted a female informant in her cell, but to no avail. Apart from a few tantalizing hints—“I could tell you things but I won’t,” Pearl remarked at one point—she remained tight-lipped about her stepdaughter’s death. “I got as chummy with her as I could,” the informant reported to Captain Clark, “but I didn’t even get the time of day from her.”

Beginning at around 10:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 22, Clark, his patience at an end, subjected Pearl to a brutal six-hour grilling at the climax of which—so he announced—“she cracked. She admitted responsibility.” In truth, Pearl’s “confession” consisted of little more than a few vague and disjointed remarks: “I have done a great wrong,” “I alone am to blame,” “When you get ready to hang me, I’ll tell a priest everything.” By the following afternoon, she had already recanted, telling Clark that she had only “made the statements to get away from you and get some sleep.”

Public opinion remained bitterly divided on the question of her guilt. For every person who saw her as a monster there was someone else convinced that the Denver police—unable to catch the real killer—were railroading Pearl. One family friend claimed that Leona hadn’t been murdered at all. Describing the girl as an “impulsive,” “quick-tempered,” and “queerly morbid” child who resented the uniform she was forced to wear to school, this woman insisted that Leona had committed suicide—a theory undermined only by the victim’s head wounds, the cause of death, and the fact that ten-year-old girls rarely kill themselves because they are unhappy with their clothing.

“The Ground Glass Murder Case” (as the tabloids dubbed it) came to trial on November 28. An enormous crowd of curiosity seekers turned out for a glimpse of Pearl, who basked in the attention. Escorted into the courthouse, she flashed her dazzling smile at the mob of cameramen assembled at the entrance. “Go ahead boys,” she said breezily, “take my picture if you want to.” Seating herself at the defense table, she made sure to keep her skirt hiked above her knees, giving the jurymen an eyeful of her shapely, silk-clad legs.

During the week-long trial, the district attorney built a strong circumstantial case, exhibiting, among other damning pieces of evidence, the bloodstained tire iron
found in the trunk of the O’Loughlins’ car and the crushed glass removed from Leona’s stomach. Pearl was ably defended by a prominent Denver attorney, John Keating, who persuaded the judge to bar any testimony relating to her confession on the grounds that it had been wrung from her under duress. Pearl, Keating argued, had absolutely no motive for the crime; it was her traditionally reviled role that had led to her persecution.

“Everyone is prejudiced against a stepmother,” he told the jurors. “There has been a mad rush to convict Pearl O’Loughlin. Everyone said, ‘That stepmother did it. Get that stepmother,’ and the police and everyone else went after the stepmother.”

For all his skill and ingenuity, however, Keating couldn’t repair one of the most damaging holes in Pearl’s story: her inability to account for her whereabouts between 7:00 and 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 14—the hours when, according to expert witnesses, Leona was murdered and dumped in the lake.