American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  At around 2:00 p.m., the same time that Virginia Griffin’s body was being discovered, Wilson dived into a nearby bar and targeted another prostitute, thirty-eight-year-old Lillian Johnson, who went with him to a room a few blocks away at the decrepit Joyce Hotel on 310 South Hill Street, near the bottom of the Angels Flight funicular railway. The “couple” asked for a wake-up call at 3:30 p.m., probably Johnson’s way of timing her tricks. Once she was naked except for her shoes and ankle socks, he punched and strangled her on the bed. He beat and bit her in such a frenzy that he bit off and swallowed one of her nipples. He had left his butcher knife at the Barclay, but he still had his razor. He slashed into her body with the razor, attempting to excise her genitals with a circular cut, accidentally cutting his own hand in the process. Almost spent, he forced the razor into the center of her chest and sawed away, opening a deep vertical gash through her torso, abdomen and down her left leg, almost severing the left third of her body clean off. Wilson then went to the washroom in the hallway to wash up but discovered that he had locked himself out of the room. After coolly getting housekeeping to open his door, he slipped in, got his jacket and left the hotel. He didn’t go very far. He walked over to a bar a few doors away on South Hill Street and began trolling for a third victim.

  In the meantime, back at the Joyce Hotel, when nobody responded to the 3:30 wake-up call, staff entered the room and found Lillian Johnson’s body on the bed. With two mutilated women found in downtown hotel rooms within a span of a few hours and matching descriptions of a suspect with a Robert Taylor–like mustache, police now fanned out through downtown bars and dives. At 5:30 p.m., LAPD officer Harry E. Donlan entered a bar a few doors down from the Joyce Hotel and observed a man matching the description seated with a glass of wine talking with a woman. On approaching the couple, the officer noted that the man had traces of dried crusted blood in his mustache and cuts on his hand. A cursory search of the man turned up an empty matchbox from the Barclay Hotel in his pocket. Otto Wilson was brought in for questioning and eventually confessed to both murders.

  Wilson had little insight into his crimes and described himself going through the motions of killing and mutilating his victims as mindlessly as a zombie. Despite having admitted to bringing a butcher knife to the scene, Wilson claimed the first murder had been triggered by Griffin’s demand for more money, but quickly added, “Of course, that is not a very good excuse, but I don’t know.” Wilson basically explained, “I was just out of my mind and I am trying to recall as much as I can.”

  LAPD’s forensic psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River interviewed Wilson and concluded that he was sane and aware of his actions but did not feel anything that would enable him to explain his actions. He was a psychopath, and according to de River, the women were

  the victims of a playful, sadistic dissectionist, the objects of the caprices of a butcher. He was not a rapist. He was highly perverted with a lust for murder. . . . This display of cruelty which is closely associated with the digestive processes, is quite indicative of sadism. This order of associations may be traced in the lower animals where one has to kill if one is hungry, and here we see this same desire, this craving for voluptuous sensations of slaughter, and if we follow this, we see how killing and slaughter become interwoven with the nutritive instinct, and in the sadomasochist complex such as in this subject’s case, we frequently find cannibalistic tendencies which may be likened to the sadistic buccal stage of childhood. During this stage the child finds pleasure and gratification in biting and sucking. This hunger concept may reach the extreme in the desire to incorporate—to swallow—to possess as one’s very own. . . . He was a necrophiliac and cannibalistic.6

  De River attributed Wilson’s disorder and hate for females to his childhood abandonment by his mother and the abusive institutional foster upbringing that left him traumatized and cannibalistic and necrophiliac—a mindless “werewolf” zombie killer.

  “Black Dahlia” Murder, Los Angeles, 1947

  The “Walking Dead Murders” would be dramatically supplanted in the public’s memory three years later by the sensational unsolved murder of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short, who was found in an empty lot at South Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum, naked and completely sawn in half at her waist, her body having been drained elsewhere of blood and meticulously bathed and groomed, her torso and breasts and legs slashed and a “Joker” smiley face carved into her cheeks from the edges of her mouth to her ears. Her face and head showed signs of battery. Her intestines were found tucked under her buttocks. Traces of ligature marks were found on her wrists and ankles; it was clear she had been held prisoner and tortured. (Short was last seen six days before her body was found.) Like the Jack the Ripper case, the Black Dahlia (the origin of the nickname is in dispute) to this day obsesses a legion of researchers and amateur investigators seeking a solution as to who so horribly murdered Elizabeth Short.

  The New Serial Killers, 1930–1949

  American serial killers in the 1920s like Earle Nelson and Albert Fish mostly arrived at a victim’s door on foot or they ambushed their victims on lonely paths or streets, dragging them away like spiders to a nearby dark alley, coal yard or deep woods where they would rape, kill and mutilate them. Many were driven by overt family madness, biblical passages or pulp adventure literature, laudanum addiction, incest child rape, and outhouse and attic room Gothic secrets. They were often odd and twitchy, Scripture-quoting, rootless, migratory, shabby outsiders; sick refugee flagellant drifters with indiscernible specks of dried blood on the cuffs of their soiled shabby pants. They did not fit into a community of neighbors and looked like the sick monsters they were. They rode the rails, they hitchhiked or they just compulsively tramped on foot from kill to kill.

  But in 1941 when serial killer Jarvis Roosevelt Catoe was identified and apprehended, he would prove to be a monstrum in its classic meaning: an omen of everything that was to come three decades later.

  Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe, “The Dupont Circle Killer,” Washington, DC, and New York, 1929–1941

  Women were murdered in Washington, DC, at an alarming rate beginning in 1929. The first in the long series to come was twenty-two-year-old Virginia McPherson, a nurse. She had recently separated from her husband, Robert, a bank clerk. On September 14, 1929, after she failed to respond to his telephone calls, her estranged husband visited her second-floor apartment near the corner of I Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Northwest Washington. He found Virginia on the floor of the bedroom, clad only in a silk pajama top. A pajama cord was tightly wrapped five times around her throat and secured in place with a surgeon’s knot.

  A coroner’s jury quickly declared Virginia’s death a suicide, but a rookie police officer with connections in the Senate managed to get the case reopened, claiming a cover-up and that there were witnesses who saw a suspect escaping out of the rear window of the apartment onto a low roof. Several senior police officials were suspended, but the case remained unsolved.

  The second victim was twenty-eight-year-old Mary Baker, a clerk with the Navy Department, on April 11, 1930. A witness saw Baker near the Washington Monument in a car with a man at the wheel who apparently struck her several times with his fist before driving the two of them away. The witness scribbled down the license plate number and reported it to the police that same evening. The license belonged to Mary’s car, which was found on a remote road on the fringe of Arlington National Cemetery the following morning. Police found Mary’s body nearby, faceup in the shallow water of a culvert. Her underwear had been torn away, and she had been scratched, strangled, beaten severely enough to dislodge several teeth and shot three times with a .25 caliber handgun in the throat, back and left side. The case remained unsolved.

  On May 24, 1934, sixty-five-year-old retired schoolteacher Mary E. Sheads was found in her Northwest Washington apartment at 2000 16th Street, the third victim. She had been punched in the eye, raped and strangled. Her ki
ller had apparently entered her apartment from a fire escape abutting her windows. From under her fingernails police scraped skin samples allegedly belonging to a “light-skinned” African American. No further leads were uncovered.

  On November 9, 1935, twenty-six-year-old Corinna Loring was found in a lovers’ lane a few blocks away from her home in Mount Rainier, just outside Washington, DC, in Maryland. Loring was a Sunday school teacher with an impeccable reputation, scheduled to be married in two days. There were two bone-deep lacerations over her right eye and an inexplicable burn, almost like a brand, on her forehead. She had been strangled with a five-foot length of twine tightly wrapped around and embedded in her throat. A whiskey bottle with a pocket-sized edition of the Bible stuffed through its neck was found nearby. Police suspected several former suitors and even her fiancé’s ex-girlfriend. Corinna was buried in her wedding gown, and the case remained unsolved.

  The national press kept count of the unsolved murders. “ONE MORE IN THE CHAIN OF WASHINGTON’S BAFFLING MURDER MYSTERIES,” the Dayton Daily News reported in 1936. Although the concept of a serial killer had not yet been precisely articulated, the newspaper hinted that the murders were interconnected. “The national capital is stirred by the strangling of beautiful Corinna Loring, the fourth time in six years that a pretty girl has met mysterious and violent death under circumstances strangely similar.”7

  The Herald-Press in Michigan reported, “Washington, Home of the ‘Best’ Detective Brains, Cannot Solve Murders of Four Young Women . . . Four murders all bearing the same resemblance . . . and yet all different. In each case a beautiful young woman was slain by a hand which left no trace.”8 The Minneapolis Tribune described some of the murders as “motiveless.”9

  Police in Washington, DC, could not imagine or comprehend the notion of a single multiple murderer, despite the precedents. It was not something in their realm of experience or language yet, nor would it be until well into the 1970s.

  On December 31, 1935, nineteen-year-old Beulah Limerick was found dead in her bed in her 19th Street apartment in Southeast Washington. An inexperienced doctor at the scene certified her death as natural due to “internal hemorrhage,” and her body was released to a funeral home. As the undertaker began preparing the corpse, he uncovered a small .25 caliber gunshot wound in the nape of her neck, cleverly stuffed with her hair and combed over by the killer, who also washed away the blood and applied rouge to the dead girl’s face.

  The case immediately attracted avid press attention. Beulah was the “secretary” of a former prohibition-era drinking club, the Sky High Whoopee Club, and since the age of fifteen had had a string of lovers and admirers she described in a diary that was found in her apartment. Eventually, a Washington Metropolitan PD police officer was charged in her murder but was acquitted at trial. The Limerick murder was the subject of gossip and speculation for years to come.

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  After the death of Beulah Limerick, the murders appeared to abruptly cease—but only because the newspapers were no longer reporting them. The killing went on; at least six more women were murdered, primarily in the Northwest section of Washington, DC, most raped, strangled and battered. But they were all African American. The press was not interested in reporting these crimes. Even today we only have a sparse and sketchy grasp of these murders of black women:

  Florence Dancy, 65, April 12, 1935, murdered in her home on 2139 L Street NW;

  Josephine Robinson, 34, December 1, 1939, Blagden Court NW, with no further details;

  Lucy Kidwell, 62, September 28, 1940, a landlady strangled in her home at 307 Virginia Avenue SE;

  Mattie Steward, 48, November 28, 1940, a landlady strangled in her home at 1432 Swann Street NW;

  Ada Puller, 22, January 22, 1941, strangled in her basement apartment at 1442 Corcoran Street NW;

  Mabel Everett, 16, June 30, 1941, found battered to death in an apartment building basement locker at 3032 14th Street NW.

  Dupont Circle Murders

  Then in 1941, a white woman was raped and strangled in her own apartment, and the press suddenly woke up and threw itself at this new murder in a series that was eventually dubbed the “Dupont Circle Murders.”

  Twenty-five-year-old Rose Abramowitz had been married to her husband, Barney, for exactly a month on March 8, 1941. They lived in a small upscale apartment building at 1901 16th Street NW, up the road from Dupont Circle. She was a secretary, while Barney worked at the Social Security agency as a staff lawyer. To celebrate their one-month anniversary, they were having some of Barney’s friends from work over in the evening. That Saturday morning, Rose stayed home to supervise a janitor who was going to wax the floors before the guests arrived, while Barney went in for a half day’s work at the office.

  Barney returned home at around 1:30 p.m. to find Rose, lying on her side, one hand resting on her chest and the other beside her. She was clad only in her housecoat, and her slippers were neatly placed at the foot of the bed.10 The medical examiner determined that she had been raped and manually strangled. Once again, the case remained unsolved.

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  On Sunday, June 15, twenty-two-year-old Jessie Elizabeth “Betty” Strieff was expecting her fiancé for dinner. She lived with a coworker in a small apartment on 19th Street NW near Dupont Circle, about four blocks away from where Rose Abramowitz had been murdered three months earlier.

  Betty was a spirited, independent girl from Iowa with everything going for her. Exuberant and pretty, she was a graduate of Drake University and held a private pilot’s license. Employed in the Ordnance Division of the War Department, she had top secret clearance and had been recently promoted to chief clerk.

  It was around 2:30 p.m., in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, just starting to rain heavily, when Betty realized she didn’t have enough butter for the lemon pie she was planning to bake. She quickly donned a transparent hooded rain cape over a skimpy blue-and-white-striped “playsuit” with a wraparound skirt she had been wearing with sports socks and saddle shoes, grabbed her roommate’s umbrella of translucent oiled silk printed with white polka dots and quarter moons, and dashed out to a store three blocks away to buy a stick of butter. She must have looked as if she stepped straight out of the pages of Vanity Fair or Harper’s Bazaar in her jaunty single-girl Sunday afternoon outfit, accessorized with the gay silk umbrella.

  She’d be back in five minutes, she told her roommate.

  Betty never returned.

  A clerk at the store later told police that she had arrived in a black car that remained double-parked outside while she made her purchase. The clerk could not make out the driver’s face through the pouring rain and back-and-forth swish of the windshield wipers.

  Betty’s body, naked except for her wet shoes and socks, was discovered the next morning eight blocks away from her apartment at the end of a trail of blood leading through an alley into a two-car garage behind a retired professor’s house on 1717 Q Street NW. She had been beaten up, stripped naked, brutally raped and garroted with a belt or rope. Her blue playsuit and underwear were missing along with her raincoat and umbrella. Once again, Washington PD was helpless in solving the case.

  The newspaper headlines blared, “GIRL’S MURDER IS 7TH FOR D.C. IN 8 YEARS.”11 Many of the murders had occurred on streets in Northwest Washington radiating from Dupont Circle, and were now dubbed the “Dupont Circle Murders.”

  District of Columbia, a federal territory, was administrated by a congressional committee. Representative Felix Edward Hébert, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana who served on the committee, used Strieff’s murder as an opportunity to conduct a federal investigation into the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. As Hébert argued, “There is no excuse for the failure of the department to check crime and solve a murder occasionally.”

  Serial Murder and the P
olitics of Race

  The committee hearings focused entirely on the Washington PD’s failure to solve the murders of white women and completely ignored the string of unpublicized murders of black women.

  As historian Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy recounts:

  An unknown perpetrator began to attack black women in the nation’s capital. Four black women—Josephine Robinson, Lucy Kidwell, Mattie Steward, and Ada Puller—were raped and murdered. . . . The white press did not cover these deaths when they occurred, and police officers conducted minimal investigations to locate the culprit. While these murders did not occur at the hands of the police, the police department’s apathetic response signaled an institutional culture of racialized negligence around black women’s safety in the city, which was itself a form of brutality. This profound indifference toward black women was thrown into sharp relief in June 1941 when Jessie Elizabeth “Betty” Strieff, a twenty-two-year-old white clerk from Iowa, was raped and murdered. News of Strieff’s murder made local and national headlines.12

  The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper asked, “How thorough an investigation did the police make when they found Mrs. Kidwell murdered? Mrs. Florence Dancy ravished? Mrs. Ada Puller mutilated?”