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Don’t miss these “top-drawer true-crime” (Booklist)
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HAROLD SCHECHTER
DEVIANT
DERANGED
DEPRAVED
BESTIAL
FIEND
FATAL
and
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF SERIAL KILLERS
by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
Be sure to read Harold Schechter’s acclaimed historical crime
fiction featuring Edgar Allan Poe
THE HUM BUG
and
NEVERMORE
All available from Pocket Books
“America’s foremost pop historian of serial
murder” (The Boston Book Review),
Harold Schechter reveals a real-life monster of
the 1920s—and brilliantly documents the
historical impact of his ghastly crimes
BESTIAL
The Savage Trail of a True American Monster
“[An] essential addition…. Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.”
—The Boston Book Review
“[A] deftly written, unflinching account…. A fascinating police procedural…. Schechter’s macabre stories unfold like finely-tuned crime novels…. Well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look.”
—Journal Star (Peoria, IL)
Look for Harold Schechter’s essential account of H. H. Holmes, whose grotesque crimes shattered turn-of-the-century Chicago
DEPRAVED
The Shocking True Story of America’s
First Serial Killer
“Shocking…. Depraved demonstrates that sadistic psychopaths are not a modern-day phenomenon…. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”
—Ann Rule, bestselling author of Heart Full of Lies
“Destined to be a true crime classic…. As chilling as The Silence of the Lambs and as blood curdling as the best Stephen King novel.”
—Flint(MI)Journal
“A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed, and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer who embodied the ferociously dark side of America’s seemingly timeless preoccupations with ambition, money, and power. Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”
—Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist
“An astonishing piece of popular history…. I unhesitatingly recommend [Depraved]… to round out your understanding of the true depth, meaning, and perversity of [this] uniquely American brand of mayhem.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Schechter’s writing keeps you turning the pages….”
—Syracuse Herald-American
And don’t miss Harold Schechter’s other
true-crime masterpieces
FIEND
The Shocking True Story of America’s
Youngest Serial Killer
“A memorably gothic tale…. True-crime lovers will not want to miss it.”
—Publishers Weekly
DERANGED
The Shocking True Story of America’s
Most Fiendish Killer
“Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real….”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
DEVIANT
The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein,
the Original “Psycho”
“[A] grisly, wonderful book…. Scrupulously researched.”
—Film Quarterly
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
SERIAL KILLERS
By Harold Schechter and David Everitt
“The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”
—The Boston Book Review
“A grisly tome…. Schechter knows his subject matter.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
“The ultimate reference on this fascinating phenomenon.”
—PI Magazine
Praise for Harold Schechter’s historical
crime fiction featuring Edgar Allan Poe
THE HUM BUG
“A riveting excursion…. Poe and his times come across with wonderful credibility and vitality.”
—Booklist
NEVERMORE
“[Schechter] … keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A literary confection…. A first-rate mystery.”
—Booklist
Pocket Books by Harold Schechter
NONFICTION
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
(with David Everitt)
Deranged
Depraved
Deviant
Fiend
Bestial
Fatal
FICTION
Nevermore
The Hum Bug
Outcry
Bestial
THE SAVAGE TRAIL OF A
TRUE AMERICAN MONSTER
HAROLD SCHECHTER
POCKET STAR BOOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”
A Pocket Star Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright ©1998 by Harold Schechter
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The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum
BEStiAL
This book is lovingly dedicated
(at long last) to my niece,
Ilene Schlanger
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
PROLOGUE
PART 1 THE NAME OF THE BEAST
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART 2 STRANGLER
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
PART 3 PREY
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
PART 4 THE GORILLA
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
>
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
PART 5 BY THE NECK
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
EPILOGUE
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
PROLOGUE
†
We tend to think of serial murder as a symptom of our own alarmingly violent age—and there’s some truth to this perception.
To be sure, homicidal maniacs have existed in all times and places. Historians of crime can cite a host of premodern monsters—human predators whose atrocities easily match (and often surpass) those of Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard “The Night Stalker” Rodriguez. The anonymous madman known as Jack the Ripper, for example, may be the most celebrated sex-murderer of the nineteenth century, but he was certainly not the only one. His Gallic counterpart, Joseph Vacher, dubbed “The French Ripper,” butchered a dozen victims before his arrest in 1897; while in our own country, the “Archfiend,” Dr. H. H. Hohnes, committed an indeterminate number of homicides during the same period. (He confessed to twenty-seven.) In the post-World War I era, the German sociopath Fritz Haarmann, the notorious “Vampire of Hanover,” perpetrated some of the most unspeakable crimes of the century, including the mutilation-murder of at least fifty young boys.
Clearly, in the realm of sexual homicide, as in all other areas of human experience, there is no new thing under the sun.
Still, it is only in recent years that the problem has become so severe that certain writers on the subject bandy words like plague and epidemic. While this language smacks of hyperbole (not to say hysteria), it remains true that these crimes have increased at an unsettling rate. As much as any movie star or media celeb, the serial killer—the psychopathic monster masquerading behind a façade of bland normality—has become one of the denning symbols of our day.
A chart put together by criminologist Ron Hohnes, which lists every American serial killer of the twentieth century, confirms the point. The list contains only 18 names for the first four decades of the century. By contrast, in the years since 1970 alone, there are over 120—and that doesn’t count the ones who haven’t been caught.
Indeed, the term “serial killer” wasn’t even coined until the mid-1970s (by FBI criminologist Robert K. Ressler. Before then, serial murder was so rare that it wasn’t perceived as a separate category of crime. Before then, in fact, it was so rare that, when one of these lust-killers went on a spree, the police often couldn’t tell what they were dealing with.
That was certainly the case in the 1920s. In the latter years of that decade, the country was shocked by a string of killings that seemed almost inconceivably brutal. This is not to say that Americans of that era were unfamiliar with vicious crimes. On the contrary, it was a time so rife with violence that one historian has dubbed it “The Lawless Decade.” But the murders that made the headlines tended to involve tommy guns, bootleggers, and victims with nicknames like Bloody Angelo, Little Mike, and Tony the Gentleman.
The killings that commenced in February 1926 were of a frighteningly different order from the gangland carnage of the day. The victims were ordinary women, most of them middle-aged but some significantly younger, who were savagely slain in their homes. Often, their strangled and outraged corpses were discovered in bizarre hiding places—shoved into steamer trunks, thrust under beds, crammed behind basement furnaces.
The American public had never known anything like it. Other murders may have received more publicity (like the sensational 1922 double slaying of the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and his choir-singer mistress, Mrs. Eleanor Mills, whose corpses were found, amid a scattering of love letters, in a New Jersey orchard). But none provoked greater horror. There seemed to be a monster on the loose. Nowadays, we know what to call such creatures—but back then, the phrase “serial killer” was still fifty years in the future. To die terrified citizens of the time, the unknown maniac—roaming from city to city, selecting his victims at random—seemed like something from a horror story, say, by Edgar Allan Poe.
Indeed, in certain grisly regards, the killer’s m.o. bore a chilling resemblance to the horrors in one of Poe’s most famous tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The victims in that story are a pair of Parisian women, a widowed mother and her grown daughter, who are hideously murdered in their apartment. The mysterious assailant, a being of prodigious strength, disposes of the daughter’s body by stuffing it feet first up the chimney.
Thanks to the deductive brilliance of Poe’s hero, C. Auguste Dupin (the fictional forerunner of Sherlock Holmes), the culprit is ultimately identified. He—or, rather, it—turns out to be an ape: more specifically, a “large, tawny Ourang-Outang” that has escaped from its owner, a French seaman who has brought the creature back from Borneo as a pet.
The true-life horrors that started in the winter of ′26 seemed like the frightening realization of these imaginary crimes—women murdered in their homes by a creature of appalling strength and savagery; corpses wedged into tiny spaces in a grotesque effort at concealment. It was as if the homicidal simian dreamed up by Poe had come terrifyingly to life.
Perhaps it was for this reason that an unknown reporter, writing about the killer in a West Coast tabloid, tagged nun with an epithet that would send tremors of apprehension from one end of the American continent to the other: the “Gorilla Man.”
Eventually the “Gorilla Man” would be captured. But not before he had completed an odyssey that carried him across the country and up into Canada. Along the way, he left a trail of corpses: twenty-two victims, all but one of them female, ranging in age from eight months to sixty-six years.
* * *
They say that truth is stranger than fiction but, in this case, that cliché doesn’t stand up. After all, what could be more bizarre than Poe’s story of a double murder committed by an Ourang-Outang?
On the other hand, the murderous monkey of Poe’s famous fantasy dispatched a total of two victims. By contrast, the true-life “Gorilla Man” did away with nearly two dozen—setting a ghastly record that would not be broken until the advent of beings like Ted Bundy, Ottis Toole, and Henry Lee Lucas. It would seem that even an imagination as morbid as Poe’s couldn’t conceive of the horrors that would become commonplace in our own century.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the appalling life of the “Gorilla Man,” it may simply be this: Truth is not necessarily stranger than fiction. But sometimes it can be a good deal more gruesome—and much, much scarier.
PART 1
THE NAME
OF THE BEAST
†
1
†
Matthew Worth Pinkerton, Murder in All Ages (1898)
It was not claimed that Durrant was insane, yet that there was something morally defective in his make-up is apparent. Cases like his do not, most happily, often occur, but their occurrence is frequent enough to show that “man is joined to the beasts of the field by his body,” and may become something worse than a beast of prey, when he flings aside conscience, love of humanity and God, and resolves, no matter at the expense of what crimes, to gratify his bestial tendencies.
To all outward appearances, Theodore Durrant (“Theo” to his friends) was a fine, upstanding specimen of young American manhood. A bright and personable twenty-three-year-old who still lived at home with his parents, he spent his weekdays pursuing his M.D. at San Francisco’s Cooper Medical College. When he wasn’t engaged hi his studies, he could generally be found at the Emanuel Baptist Church on Bartlett Street, where he served as assistant superintendent of the Sunday School, church librarian, and secretary of the Young People’s Society. His sense of civic duty seemed as strong as his Christian devotion. In addition to his other a
ctivities, he was a member of the California militia signal corps.
He was good-looking to boot: tall, trim, and athletic, with an erect carriage and fine, almost feminine, features—high cheekbones, full mouth, big, blue eyes. True, some of his acquaintances found the cast of those eyes slightly disconcerting. In certain lights, they seemed pale to the point of glassiness, “fishlike” (in the words of one contemporary).
Still, Theodore Durrant cut a handsome, even dashing, figure. Women tended to find him deeply attractive. To a striking degree, he had a good deal in common with another clean-favored psychopath, born fifty years later, with whom he shared a name: Theodore Bundy.
To be sure, even before Durrant’s monstrous nature was revealed to the world, a few of his intimates had caught glimpses of his dark side. To one companion, he bragged of his visits to the brothels of Carson City. To another, he described the time when he and three acquaintances, a trio of hard-drinking railroad workers, had assaulted an Indian woman.
Still, his friends weren’t especially troubled by these confessions. Even a paragon like Theo needed to sow his wild oats. And the rape victim, after all, had only been a squaw.
Among the respectable young women who were irresistibly drawn to Theo Durrant was an eighteen-year-old named Blanche Lament. A student at the Powell Street Normal School, where she was training for a career as a teacher, Lamont—a striking blonde with an eye-catching figure—was a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived from Montana in 1894. She had moved into the home of her elderly aunt, a widow named Noble. Sometime shortly after settling into her new life, Blanche Lamont met and became enamored of the charming young medical student, Theo Durrant.
On the afternoon of April 3, 1895, following a full day in the classroom, Blanche emerged from the Powell Street school to find Durrant waiting for her on the sidewalk. Witnesses saw the couple board a trolley, then disembark in the neighborhood of the Emanuel Baptist Church. An elderly woman who lived directly across from the red, wooden church observed the handsome young pair enter the building at precisely 4:00 P.M.
It was the last time Blanche Lamont was seen alive.
When her niece failed to return home that evening, Mrs. Noble contacted the police. The next day, having learned of Blanche’s friendship with Durrant, several officers showed up at his home to question him. Durrant’s response to the girl’s disappearance was slightly peculiar—he seemed notably indifferent, casually suggesting that she might have been shanghaied by a gang of white slavers.
Bestial Page 1
