Murphy points out, “At several points during the hearings, Representative Hébert justified the use of police brutality against black Washingtonians based on their alleged rates of crime by arguing, ‘Force begets force.’ He contended that black citizens were lawless and suggested that Washington police officers needed to locate ‘a way to handle those fellows.’”13
Murphy’s is not the bleating of a white-guilt politically correct academic historian. Newspaper accounts from the era sustain Murphy’s assessment of the racial dynamics plaguing Washington’s murders. After Strieff’s disappearance, both police and newspapers pointed the finger at the black janitor in her apartment building, but police “were unable to break down his alibi for the day.”14 Representative Hébert’s home state newspaper, the Times in Shreveport, Louisiana, reported that the recent unsolved murders of white women “were in the same general section of Washington . . . on the edge of a district heavily populated by negroes.”15
On the other hand, black newspapers like the Afro-American did not appear to cover the murders of Josephine Robinson, Lucy Kidwell, Mattie Steward and Ada Puller any more than the “white press” did.16
Serial Killer Caught
In the end, Washington’s serial murders would be solved by the NYPD. On August 4, 1941, the body of a young white woman with brunette hair was found near a sidewalk curb at a vacant dirt lot on Jerome Avenue, between Burnside Avenue and 181st Street in the Bronx. The victim had been strangled but apparently not raped (not uncommon in serial homicides; sexual assault can take many subsidiary forms other than penetrative rape). The victim was eventually identified as twenty-six-year-old Evelyn Anderson. Evelyn was a waitress at the White Top Restaurant at 167th Street and Southern Boulevard, but she hadn’t shown up at work the previous morning. When she did not return from work that evening, her husband, Erhardt, assumed she stayed over with friends in the Bronx as she sometimes did rather than return late at night to their West 92nd Street apartment in Manhattan.
Erhardt told police that some of the jewelry Evelyn wore, including a wristwatch, was missing. Erhardt had recently pawned the watch and then redeemed it shortly afterward, and police were able to recover a description and serial number from the pawnbroker. Two thousand police circulars with the watch’s details were circulated to pawnshops around the city.
On August 27, a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue reported that the watch had been pawned for four dollars by an African American giving the name Charles Wolfolk, living at 6 East 133rd Street. When police interviewed Wolfolk, he stated that the watch had been presented to him by his niece, Hazel Johnson. Hazel told the police she’d been given the watch by an admirer, Jarvis Roosevelt Catoe of Washington, DC. He had given her the watch on August 3—the day of the murder—and warned her not to pawn it as it might get him “into trouble.” Hazel also said that Catoe gave another girl a pocketbook, remarking, “I promised you a pocketbook, and I’m sorry I couldn’t get you a new one, but here is a nice second-hand one.”
He was described as a slim but powerfully built light-skinned African American, five feet nine inches tall, about 165 pounds, with extremely large, strong hands. He had arrived in July from Washington, DC, driving a black 1937 Pontiac with white sidewall tires. He had gotten a job as a busboy in a cafeteria but had been fired for making advances to a white waitress.
His landlady complained, “He went back to Washington on August 5 without paying $12 rent he owed me for the month he had roomed here. He was shiftless, no good, liked the women, and was always polishing up his car. You could never get any sense out of him, and when he’d take us for a ride we’d always have to buy gas for his car.”
Conveniently, she had his address in Washington: 1730 U Street NW, smack-dab in the middle of the Dupont Circle Murders. You didn’t have to be a forensic geoprofiler to see the significance, but the NYPD was focused on one murder, in the Bronx.
NYPD detectives flew to Washington, and accompanied by DC officers, they called at the address only to discover that Catoe and his girlfriend had recently moved. Nonetheless, in an age when automobiles were still relatively scarce, Catoe’s Pontiac was quickly located parked a few blocks away at another rooming house, at 1704 Swann Street. The detectives disabled the car’s ignition, waited until Catoe appeared and took the thirty-six-year-old suspect into custody.
Catoe was polite and cooperative. On questioning, he eventually admitted to giving Hazel the watch but spun a ridiculous story of witnessing the murder and robbery of Evelyn by two thugs who gave him her watch and handbag to buy his silence. He claimed they forced him to get rid of her body and that he did not see her face because they had wrapped it in a cloth of some kind.
Catoe was shown a picture of Evelyn Anderson and asked, “Is that the woman?”
“She sure is.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as sure.”
“How can you tell whether this is the woman if you never saw her face?”
Once Catoe’s story began to come apart, it took police about five hours to get his full confession:
That morning, I saw this woman at 92nd Street near Broadway. (She had actually been at the corner of Amsterdam and 90th Street, waiting for a bus.) I drive up beside her and asked her the way to some address in Harlem. She pointed where I should go, and I offered her a lift. She refused, but I told her, “Why not get in?” She finally did.
She told me where she worked, and I told her I’d drive her up that way. It was then 6:30. I went to a lonely spot (an alley near the restaurant) and tried to make an appointment with her. But she said she was happy with her husband and refused. So, I choked her and assaulted her.
I saw she was dead. I put her body in the back seat, put a slip cover over it, and drove to 113th Street and Seventh Avenue near where I was living. I parked the car and left it there all day. That night, after I’d had a good sleep, I drove to Jerome Avenue and dumped the body at the place where it was found.17
Evelyn’s husband doubted the story, insisting that she was extremely afraid of ride-offering strangers and would never have entered a car willingly. She must have been forced, he insisted, but in the end it made no difference.
Once Catoe finished confessing to the murder of Evelyn Anderson in the Bronx, he proceeded to confess to another ten murders of both white and black women, including the so-called Dupont Circle Murders, most of which occurred within blocks of his flat. He also confessed to over a dozen rapes in which the victims survived. Typically, many of the rapes had not even been reported to the police.
Catoe stated he “had spells” in which he would rape and kill after drinking wine and “reading detective stories about rape cases and looking at pictures of nude women.”
Catoe claimed, “I didn’t mean to kill them but some of them fought so that I had to choke them hard. They just kicked off.”
Time magazine reported that when asked how many women he had killed, “Chocolate-colored Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe held up his long sinewy fingers and counted off. ‘About ten,’ he finally said.”18 A press photographer snapped a photo of Catoe holding up his huge hands. It became the iconic image of Catoe—the Paganini of serial killer stranglers.
Catoe explained, “I didn’t squeeze their throats with my fingers. I’d put my left hand on the back of their neck and then I’d push their throats in front with my right hand. I’d just put the palm of my right hand against them, with their throat between my thumb and fingers. That way I didn’t leave any marks.”
Catoe now took police through his murders. It was often unclear whether Catoe raped the women before they were strangled or after they were dead or both.
Catoe described how on June 15 he was driving down 19th Street during a heavy rainstorm when a girl in a transparent raincoat wearing a blue playsuit mistook his car for a taxicab and hailed him. Catoe offered to give her a ride just the same, which the exuberant woman accepted. He
waited for her to purchase a stick of butter. When she got back into the car to be driven back to her apartment, Catoe either threatened or battered her into submission. He then drove her through the rain to a garage he was familiar with at 1509 S Street NW, owned by Dr. Laura Killingsworth, and raped and killed Strieff in it, strangling her with the cloth belt of her playsuit. Killingsworth would later tell police, “He used to come to my place to do odd jobs. He cleaned my car and of course knew the garage. I never locked the garage during the day and Catoe knew that too.”19
Catoe then loaded Strieff’s naked body back into his car, threw her clothes into a nearby trash can and drove the body to an alley behind Q Street. He dragged her body through the alley, leaving a bloody trail until he found an unlocked garage behind 1717 Q Street, where Strieff’s body would be found the next morning. It all happened within a half hour, he said.
Catoe kept the pretty umbrella with the polka dots and quarter moons Strieff had left in his car and gave it as a gift to his girlfriend. Police later recovered the umbrella from the girlfriend’s house, and Strieff’s roommate identified it as hers. In his girlfriend’s apartment, they also found several pairs of women’s shoes and articles of female attire that he had presented to her as gifts.
Police were not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of false confessions, and Catoe was taken to the vicinity of the various crime scenes and asked to lead the investigators through the murders. He noted correctly that the garage where he left Strieff had been painted a new color and its doors changed since he left the body there. When brought to the apartment building where he killed Rose Abramowitz in March, he led police to the correct apartment and to the spot inside where he had left her body.
Catoe described how he was walking on 16th Street on March 8, when Abramowitz appeared in front of her apartment dressed in a housecoat and slippers, anxiously looking for the caretaker who failed to arrive on time to wax her apartment floor. Turning to the first black man she saw on the street, she demanded if he knew where the caretaker was. When Catoe politely replied he had no idea who or where the caretaker was, she offered him the job to wax her floor. On an impulse, he accepted the job and followed her up the stairs into the apartment and strangled her into unconsciousness, carried her to the daybed and raped her. When she began returning to consciousness, he strangled her to death, smoothed out her housecoat and left her slippers neatly arranged at her feet. He said he took twenty dollars from her pocketbook before leaving, a fact police had withheld from the press.
This satisfied the police as to the murder of the white women. The murder of the black women would be described in a more cursory manner.
Catoe stated he visited a series of black landladies, on the pretext either of renting rooms or doing handyman work. He would insist that they show him all the rooms, to ensure that nobody else was home, then strangle them.
On April 12, 1935, he strangled sixty-five-year-old Florence Dancy. Catoe could not furnish many details of the murder or the exact address—he said he was very drunk at the time—but accurately remembered the layout of the apartment. The Dancy case was particularly touchy for the police and courts, as another black man had been convicted of the murder and sentenced to life: James Matthew Smith.
On September 28, 1940, Catoe killed sixty-two-year-old Lucy Kidwell. He lured her into the basement by telling her he was a mechanic and wanted to store his tools there. He strangled her, raped her and then carried her body upstairs. Before leaving he stole forty-two dollars. On November 28, 1940, he strangled and raped forty-eight-year-old Mattie Steward. He said, “She kicked out in my hands.” While the police were escorting Catoe to the scene of the murder on Swann Street, he gave friendly waves and greetings to several women they passed. “I used to make love to them,” he explained.
On January 22, 1941, he picked up twenty-two-year-old Ada Puller on the street and took her to a basement apartment. When she demanded money for sex, he became infuriated and choked her. He said, “She came to before I could attack her, so I choked her good.”
The exact number of murders that Catoe confessed to became blurred somewhere between seven and ten. The murder of Florence Dancy was batted back and forth while the court reviewed the conviction of James Smith.
Who Was Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe?
Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe was born October 6, 1905, in Kershaw, South Carolina, the eldest of eight children of former slaves. Catoe attended school until the fifth grade and then went to work as an undertaker’s assistant in Rock Hill. After the death of his parents in 1919, he lived on an uncle’s farm.
In 1925, Catoe suffered a fractured skull when he was thrown from a vehicle during an accident. The injury was so severe that he was not expected to live. But he did. Here again is a frequent theme in serial killer histories: a head injury followed by radical changes in behavior. As soon as Catoe recovered consciousness, his behavior had changed, his brother recalled: “When he was in the hospital in Charlotte he would often get out of hand and choke the nurses and doctors. When he finally left the hospital, he had occasional spells and acted sort of queer. We could not do anything with him so I brought him to Washington in 1929.”
Catoe worked for the police as an informant in prohibition violation cases, as a busboy in the Social Security Board cafeteria, as a garageman, houseman and handyman. In February 1932, he obtained a taxi license, listing himself as a former police employee. In 1937, he acquired a brand-new black Pontiac sedan.
Between November 16, 1931, and May 3, 1941, he had accrued seventeen traffic violations and his license was suspended, but he was allowed to continue driving pending an appeal.
As is typical of serial killers, Catoe also had a record for minor sexual offenses. He was sentenced to 135 days in jail on May 7, 1935, for two counts of indecent exposure, and then again in December he was sentenced to 180 days and released on May 5, 1936.
Esther Hall, the girlfriend to whom Catoe had given Betty Strieff’s umbrella, loyally came to visit him in jail, accompanied by three other female friends of his. They all came out after the visit amazed by Catoe’s confessions, one of them remarking, “I never would have believed it of Jarvis.”
Catoe’s brother would later say, “It was a great shock to me when I saw my brother’s picture in the paper. I could hardly believe that he was the one who had killed those poor girls. Yet, now, after thinking it all over, I can understand how it could have happened.
“He told me not to worry. He said to tell all our folks not to worry. Just pray for him. He said we shouldn’t spend any money on lawyers. I just can’t believe he meant to do all this. He never was right ever since that accident. His own wife wouldn’t live with him because he would have these spells.”
Catoe had married a girl in North Carolina, but they separated. His brother John had brought her to Washington in the hope of reconciling his brother with his wife, but it didn’t work out. Catoe would sometimes disappear for a week at a time. Sometimes he would sleep in his car and wouldn’t come into the house. Finally, his wife went home.
Women who knew Catoe described him as a “smooth” talker who had a way of striking up a conversation and keeping it going. The day after the murder of Betty Strieff, Carrie Jackson, the landlady of his rooming house at 1730 U Street, was sitting on the front steps of the house. She later told reporters, “Catoe came downstairs and sat on the steps beside me. I was reading about the murder. He asked me, ‘What are you reading in the paper? What’s the big story?’
“I told him that a girl had been raped and killed and that she lived just around the corner on Nineteenth Street. He didn’t seem nervous or act unusual. I told him that she had been raped and that it was a terrible thing. He then said: ‘Yes, it sure is. The man must have been crazy to do a thing like that! Do you think they’ll ever catch him?’
“Whenever I did see Catoe, he would ask me if there were anything new in the murder case. He always s
aid the police wouldn’t solve it.”
Jarvis Catoe went on trial in October 1941 for the murder of Rose Abramowitz. By then he was claiming he had been coerced into a confession. Police, however, had ensured that his confessions were not the only evidence mustered against him by having him take them to the scenes of his murders and walk them through them. Catoe was sentenced to death for the murder of Abramowitz.
Although indicted for the other murders, Catoe never stood trial for any of them.
The review of James Matthew Smith’s conviction for the murder of Florence Dancy in 1935 dragged on for years. Smith had been fighting his conviction long before Catoe was arrested. Smith was so vehement about his innocence that at one point he was transferred to a psychiatric facility for a period of two years.
Catoe’s confession, which was so detailed that police stated they were persuaded he had committed the murder, did not lead to Smith’s release.20 On the eve of Catoe’s scheduled execution in 1943, he was supposed to testify on Smith’s behalf. Instead, Catoe broke out of a line in prison and climbed up sixty-five feet onto a railing, where he perched for the next three hours, threatening to jump as prison guards, firemen and inmates tried to coax him down. Eventually, Catoe came down and gave his testimony—he recanted his confession, condemning Smith to remain in prison.21 All further news of James Matthew Smith’s fate promptly vanished from the public record.
On January 15, 1943, Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe was executed in the electric chair.
The press had been right that there was a serial killer on the loose in Washington, DC. But they were wrong about which victims he had killed. The murders of Virginia McPherson, Mary Baker, Mary E. Sheads, Corinna Loring and Beulah Limerick were never solved.
The Monstrum Catoe
Catoe was indeed in many ways a harbinger—a monstrum—of the kind of serial killers to come in the 1970s:
American Serial Killers Page 7
