Moser stated that he and Rees had been roommates, along with two women, in a Norfolk beachfront cabin at the time of the Jackson murders. On the night of the Jackson family abduction, Moser claimed, Rees was scheduled to play in a club in Washington, DC, but left Norfolk too late to arrive on time. The FBI checked with the club, but the manager had insufficient records to determine whether Rees had appeared that night, nor could they find any band members who could conclusively recall if Rees had played on that occasion. Moser stated that Rees inexplicably did not return to the beach house for ten days after the murders.
Moser stated that Rees had strange “existential” ideas. “He would never say it was wrong to kill but believed that there are individual standards of right and wrong. It was an Existentialist theory. Anything he reads he likes to experience. He’s a thrill-seeker, I suppose.”
Moser’s mother recalled that Rees had been since his childhood a frequent guest in her home and that in recent years she occasionally joined in the philosophical discussions that her son and Rees were engaged in. She recalled she disagreed with his existentialist argument that violence in some cases can be forgiven on the grounds that it is self-expression.
“But if you don’t feel, you’re dead,” he replied, railing against “today’s sick society.”
Mrs. Moser reminded Rees that he had good health, good looks, a quick mind and an unmistakable talent in music. “With all that it seems as if you’d enjoy living.”
“There are some things that I find pleasure in doing,” Rees replied, without explaining what they were.33
Mrs. Moser was unconvinced by her son’s suspicions. She admitted that Rees was somewhat erratic and passive-aggressive—he would cheat, for example, in a friendly game of Scrabble—but she could recall no occasion on which he had been involved in a violent act, not even a schoolyard fight.
Moser said Rees was obsessed with true-crime stories, Nazi atrocities and personalities, and existentialist philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Rees also enjoyed reading the Marquis de Sade, according to Moser. Rees was addicted to the amphetamine Benzedrine (bennies) and was on a cough syrup “Benzedrine jag” the night before the Harold murder. Moser stated that he first became suspicious after the Harold murder when newspapers published a composite portrait of the suspect that resembled Rees. When Mildred Jackson and her daughter were found near the same location as the Harold murder, Moser became even more suspicious.
Moser described Rees as bright and talented, the son of a respectable family, “but he takes benzedrine and he has something wrong with him sexually. Why, in March 1955, about eight months after he got married to a nice Baltimore girl, he tried to drag a woman into his car at the Hyattsville bus stop. It was hushed up, but we all knew then there was something wrong.”34
He stated that one day while driving with Rees he confronted him about the murders and that Rees became so nervous he drove the car off the road. Later, in the company of several fellow musicians, he again confronted Rees, urging him to contact the police and submit to an interview. Rees became terribly upset, and Moser never saw him again.
Why it took authorities so long to investigate the information provided by Moser has never been well explained in any sources. Rees certainly met the physical description of the suspect. He was tall, had relatively handsome chiseled features, dark black hair combed back and prominent dark bushy eyebrows. He drove a blue Ford like the one reported terrorizing other couples on the roads around the time of the Jackson abduction.
When exactly and which jurisdiction first reviewed Melvin Rees’s criminal record is unclear, but they would have found only two items listed. The first was minor: on April 1953, Rees was fined $10 and $4.25 for throwing trash on a highway in Virginia.35 The second was more troubling and exactly as Moser had described it: on March 25, 1955, Rees had been charged with assault when a woman said he attempted to drag her into his car while she was waiting for a bus. The unidentified woman refused to press charges and they were dismissed.
According to Katherine Ramsland, Rees had already come to the attention of the police in the 1956 murders of Mary Fellers and Shelby Venable. As one of the many males the girls were acquainted with, he was apparently interviewed and eliminated as a suspect. It is not unusual in serial murder cases for police to discover, when they finally make an arrest, that the accused was known to them and that they’d even been interviewed already, sometimes several times, as in the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, or in Britain, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
Realizing that Rees had been a student at the University of Maryland, police returned to interview Wanda Tipton again, whose photo was found in the cinder block shack during the Margaret Harold murder investigation. Tipton now admitted to having dated Rees and that she had lied to them because she did not want to cause him problems with his wife. Now police had evidence that Rees was connected to the shack.
It wasn’t until June 1960 that the FBI finally interviewed Rees in East Memphis. (Ramsland reports the FBI had difficulty finding him until Moser heard from Rees and furnished his new address to the FBI.) When questioned, Rees appeared unperturbed, polite and mild mannered. Sergeant Roy Hudson, Harold’s companion on the day of her murder, was brought down to view a lineup and identified Rees as the man who had attacked the couple. That clinched it. Rees was arrested on June 24, 1960, and charged with unlawful flight from the prosecution of the Margaret Harold murder.
Shortly afterward, federal prosecutors added the charge of abducting across state lines Mildred and Susan Jackson, the only other crime that federal authorities had jurisdiction in.
Melvin D. Rees Jr.—The Sketchy Bio
Melvin Davis Rees Jr. was born in Washington, DC, on January 21, 1929, to telephone company employee Melvin Davis Rees and US Department of Interior office worker Virginia Elizabeth (Allen) Rees.36 He was raised in Hyattsville, Maryland, in the vicinity of the murders, and frequently stayed there on and off with his parents throughout the 1950s. Nothing is known about his childhood other than there might have been behavioral problems and he was packed off to the Edwards Military Institute in Salemburg, North Carolina, where “the pupils often came from broken and single parent homes,”37 but his father denied that. It does not appear that he graduated high school despite his apparent intelligence and good grades, a sign of trouble.
His parents described Melvin as a completely normal, clever, friendly boy who liked animals and was musically gifted. He could read and write music by the age of ten. When testifying about his son’s visit the day after the Jacksons disappeared, his father said, “He has a kind and sympathetic nature and could not hurt any living thing. His little son adores him. He could not possibly have maintained his natural disposition and manner with us if he had this horrible thing on his mind.”38
Rees joined the Army in October 1946 and later transferred to the Air Force. He was stationed for some time in Britain, where he played in a military band and attained the rank of corporal before leaving the service in 1953. While stationed in Britain, he enrolled in the overseas program of the University of Maryland. After his discharge, he continued studying economics at the University of Maryland on their College Park campus from 1953 to 1957 but never graduated, dropping out to pursue a full-time career as a jazz musician playing primarily in various clubs across Maryland and Virginia.
Fellow students remembered Rees as friendly, mild mannered, intelligent, and a very talented and versatile musician who could play saxophone, vibraphone, piano and accordion. He loved to cite poetry and was enamored with the more nihilist aspects of existentialism, as Moser had reported. He taught piano to young students and in fact on the days before and after the Jackson murders was giving lessons in Washington, DC.
In late 1954, Rees married Elaine Rachmaninoff, whom he had met at the university. They had a son, Philip. They separated in 1957 and divorced in 1959. His ex-wife testified that he did
not beat her and denied any “unusual” sexual practices. She said she sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion.
In 1958, Rees met nineteen-year-old red-haired stripper Pat Routt, who was dancing under the name Vivian Storm. They moved in together, and she was living with Rees in West Memphis when he was arrested.
“The Mother and Daughter Were All Mine”
On the day Rees was arrested, the FBI showed up at his parents’ home in Hyattsville with a search warrant. At first, they found nothing incriminating, but eventually they uncovered a small hidden compartment at the back of a closet in which they found a locked accordion case. Rees Sr. gave them permission to open it. In it police found two pieces of highly incriminating evidence.
First, there was a blue steel snub-nosed .38 revolver with traces of blood on it. Unfortunately, the bullets recovered from the crime scenes were too damaged to conduct a ballistic match test with the handgun, nor, in pre-DNA times, could the traces of blood be conclusively matched to any of the victims. But the grips found at the site of Carroll Jackson’s murder would be matched through a broken screw and scratches from the metal burrs on the handgun handle frame.
The second piece of evidence was what became known as the “Death Diary.” In it Rees described what he had done to the Jacksons. He wrote, “Caught on lonely road. After pulling them over leveled pistol and ordered them out and into car trunk was open for husband and both bound. Drove to select area and killed husband and baby. Now the mother and daughter were all mine” (emphasis in the original). A newspaper photo of Mildred was attached to the pages with a gag drawn over her mouth. Beneath the photo was a detailed account of what Rees had done to Mildred. Police withheld that passage from the public and court record, except for the ending of the last sentence: “then tied and gagged, led to her place of execution and hung her.”39
Trials and Judgments
Melvin Rees was first tried in federal court in Baltimore in February and March 1961, charged with violation of the Lindbergh Law in the case of Mildred and Susan Jackson. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Then he was sent over to Virginia to stand trial for the capital murder of Carroll Jackson in Spotsylvania County, a death penalty charge.
From the beginning, the defense attempted to exclude both the handgun and “Death Diary” on the grounds that neither the search warrant nor the parents’ permission gave the FBI authority to open the locked accordion case, which belonged to Rees, not his parents. The court ruled that the diary was inadmissible as it violated Rees’s Fifth Amendment constitutional protection from self-incrimination; however, the handgun could be admitted into evidence.
The trials were a hell of a show.
All the Rees women took the stand in his defense, mom (he was kind to animals and affectionate), ex-wife (he never beat me and we only had “straight” sex), ex-girlfriend (he was romantic and handsome and could get any girl). They all wept and sang his praises. Yes, he had his quirks and failings, but there was absolutely nothing violent or kinky about Dave, as Rees liked to be called.
When Rees’s ex-girlfriend, Pat Routt, stripper “Vivian Storm” took the stand, she was dressed for Instagram before there was Instagram. The papers reported, “The dark red-haired witness wore a two-piece black silk dress with high neckline and three-quarter sleeves. She had on large pearl earrings, white gloves and black patent leather pumps.”40
“She spoke quietly in a voice that could be barely heard.”
“She crossed her legs casually.”
The courtroom spectator lines went around the block.
Asked by the prosecutor if she was “a strip teaser,” she replied, “Not exactly, no, I’m a specialty dancer.”
Routt insisted that she and Rees had “normal sexual relations.” Asked if she had ever posed nude for Rees, she gamely replied, “I never posed in the nude,” but, “Yes, he did take pictures” while she was in the bath.
It was dirty and salacious in an era of “I like Ike” clean-cut American Protestant simplicity and Leave It to Beaver conformative innocence. Routt was the anti–June Cleaver whore, the psychosexual right hand to Melvin Rees’s sadistic left, which abducted, brutalized, murdered and necro-raped wholesome June Cleaver mothers like Margaret and Mildred.
It was the horniest of true-detective magazine fantasies—sex and death, killing Mother—and it appealed to the ancient stirrings of lycanthropic monstrosity: the serial killer as a dual mirror to humanity, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the nice guy Lon Chaney Jr. and the werewolf monster into which he transforms.
Through the trials, Rees remained calm and stoic, dark and handsome in that chiseled Rock Hudson way. He even had a Madison Avenue executive suit on. Women swooned before the Sex Beast. But in May 1961, Rees was convicted in Virginia in the murder of Carroll Jackson and sentenced to death.
Once the trials were over, nobody really talked much about the Sex Beast and he was mostly forgotten in the post-JFK slaughter to come, and even today the case remains obscure.
Melvin Rees Postscripts
Pat Routt went on to earn a good measure of posttrial fame, becoming Pat Barrington, a 1960s B-movie star with roles in cult films like Orgy of the Dead, Psychedelica Sexualis, The Agony of Love, Mondo Topless, The Girl with Hungry Eyes, The Satanist, The Acid Eaters, Hedonistic Pleasures and Sisters in Leather. She continued stripping until the early 1990s, then became a telemarketer. She died in 2004.41
After Rees was convicted there were numerous appeals, which were sporadically reported in short newspaper blurbs. There were sanity reviews and more appeals. By 1967, Rees appeared to break down mentally. He became an unkempt, apathetic, drooling zombie. He waived his right to appeal and demanded to be executed. The Supreme Court questioned his mental competence to make such a decision and temporarily vacated his death sentence and waited for him to regain his competency for decades, until Rees died of heart problems at age sixty-six in a federal facility in Missouri on July 10, 1995.42 The Rees death penalty suspension remained a citable case in Supreme Court deliberations as recently as 2013, when a unanimous ruling invalidated it as a future precedent.43
In 1985, ten years before his death, Rees gave a journalist from the Richmond Times-Dispatch an exclusive interview in which he confessed to abducting and strangling the teenage girls Mary Fellers and Shelby Venable; he claimed they were his first victims and denied any role in the 1955 ambush shooting of Nancy Shomette and Michael Ann Ryan. (In 2000, the Washington Post reported an alleged 1995 deathbed confession from a man in Florida, who grew up in the vicinity of the murders, claiming that when he was seventeen years old, he shot the girls with a squirrel rifle in a rage after one of them rudely rejected his invitation for a date.44)
Rees explained that he had been addicted to Benzedrine for ten years and had not slept for four or five days prior to murdering the Jacksons. The shape and form of his sadistic fantasies, he said, came from his compulsive reading of true-detective magazines. He denied beating Mildred, claiming that he had attempted to hang her in the shack but that her nylon stocking couldn’t hold her weight and she bruised her face when she fell to the floor. He said he completely forgot about the five-year-old Susan, having locked her in the trunk. When he let her out, she began screaming and he hit her with a two-by-four board and threw her on top of her mother in the shallow grave he had dug.
Clarnell’s Boy: “Just Wondered How It Would Feel to Shoot Grandma”
As Ed Gein, Harvey Glatman and Melvin Rees acted out their long-gestated fantasies, the future “epidemic era” serial killers were entering into their formative childhoods. The 1950s was when the disappointed war bride Clarnell was abandoned by her broken war hero husband, E. E. Kemper, who insisted on pursuing his trade as an electrician despite her protests that it was “beneath his station.” Eventually, he took a contract to work as an electrician on the nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific for several years. He would later say, “Suicide mission
s in wartime and the atomic bomb testings were nothing compared to living with her.” In his absence, little Edmund became the go-to target of Clarnell’s frustration and anger with her unmanageable husband. She enlisted Edmund’s two sisters to torment little Edmund, making him the subject of their joint derision. In response Edmund severed the heads of one of his sisters’ Barbie dolls. He lopped off the top of the family cat’s skull and hid its carcass in his closet. He buried another one alive. He began nocturnal forays peeking into neighbors’ windows with a knife in hand. When his sister teased him that he wanted to kiss her teacher, Edmund told her, “I would have to kill her first.”
Edmund grew to be unusually tall for an adolescent: six feet four. (He reached six feet nine as an adult.) He was a sensitive child with a then tested high IQ of 136. For reasons known only to her, Clarnell became concerned that Edmund was going to molest his sisters. One day, Edmund returned from school and found his bedroom had been moved into the cellar.
E. E. Kemper eventually divorced Clarnell and settled in his home state of California. He remarried and started a new family. Clarnell married twice more, she claimed because her son “needed a father.” The marriages did not work out any better than her first marriage. Clarnell was unable to find a man who could live up to her expectations, and she vented her frustrations on her son, Ed.
Edmund began his transformation into a serial killer unusually young, at the age of fifteen in the summer of 1964. He had begged to go live with his father and eventually ran away and showed up at his father’s door in 1963. His dad took his new family and Edmund to visit his parents, seventy-two-year-old Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. and his wife, the artist and author of boys’ stories, sixty-six-year-old Maude Hughey Kemper. They had retired to a seventeen-acre farm in North Fork, California. When the Christmas visit ended, Edmund’s dad left Kemper with his grandparents to raise him.
American Serial Killers Page 19
