Arnold recalled another instance when Earle shaved his head “in such a way that the hair was not altogether taken off in one place and the head completely denuded in another.” Earle had saved his shaven hair, offering it to Mrs. Arnold as pillow stuffing.
One occasion stood out with particular force in Arnold’s recollections—the time that Earle “took a wheelbarrow and slowly walked around the road for a distance of about five miles, picking up small pebbles.” After wheeling his load back to Arnold’s workshed, Earle painted the pebbles with whitewash, then proceeded to lay them out in strange, seemingly random trails around the property. Arnold also remembered a time when Earle “left an automobile he was driving on the road without explanation and did not return for it.”
In spite of all this weirdness, Arnold regarded Earle as a strong, willing laborer with a “kindly tractable manner” who readily followed instructions,“never demurring or hesitating.” As far as Arnold was concerned, his handyman was “altogether harmless.”
Others who encountered Earle during this period, however, weren’t so sure. One of these was Mrs. L. J. Casey, Jr., a friend of the Arnolds’, who spent a week with them at their Palo Alto home in 1926. To Mrs. Casey’s eyes, there was something deeply unsettling about the young handyman, who was always “laughing and talking to himself” (as she would later testify). On one stormy afternoon during her visit, she saw Earle sitting coatless in the drenching rain, gazing with a weird intensity at the dismal sky.
“I would not have that man around,” she remarked later that day to Frank Arnold. “He is surely crazy.” But Arnold just laughed and said that there was no harm in the handyman. He was just a “simple fool.”
Increasingly, however, Arnold’s wife, Rhoda, came to share the opinion of her friend. As Arnold would later explain, his wife eventually grew “anxious and fearful of having [Earle] around our home and children, a man of such peculiar traits and tendencies, and she requested that I send him away, for the reason that he was not mentally sound and right.”
Though Arnold continued to believe that his wife’s fears were exaggerated, he finally gave in to her urgings and let Earle go.
As it turned out, the intuitions of the two women, Mrs. Casey and Mrs. Arnold, were even keener than they knew. No other facts about Earle’s life from this period can be ascertained with any precision—except for one: By the time Frank Arnold fired him, Earle Leonard Ferral had already begun to kill.
PART 2
STRANGLER
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St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 1925
The truth is that the United States is approaching a condition somewhat resembling anarchy, and that unless something practical is done pretty soon, it may be too late.
In a nation where cultural change occurs at a head-spinning pace, seventy years is an aeon. From the perspective of the present moment, the 1920s seem like a period full of quaint and curious customs, from the mah-jongg fad to the Charleston craze to the popularity of Dr. Emile Coué’s surefire panacea (a twelve-word formula guaranteed to bring contentment if recited regularly: “Day by day in every way I am getting better and better”). For all its wildness and sophistication, the Jazz Age seems like a time of sweet simplicity compared to the 1990s—the era of “My Blue Heaven” instead of “Murder Was the Case,” Son of the Sheik instead of Terminator II, Our Dancing Daughters instead of Teenage Bondage Sluts.
There is one respect, however, in which a time traveller from the present, journeying back seventy years, would feel surprisingly at home. Opening a newspaper in any city of the land, such a sojourner would quickly discover that, in 1926 as in 1996, the paramount concern of most Americans was the frightening increase in violent crime.
Concern is really an understatement. At its height in the mid-1920s, the mood that gripped the country was more like mass hysteria, stoked by the crime-frenzied news media. The 1924 murder of little Bobby Franks seemed to confirm the worst fears of the older generation about the evils of the “Younger Set.” The fourteen-year-old Chicago boy was kidnapped and killed by two older acquaintances, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, a pair of pampered collegians who committed the outrage to prove that they could pull off the “perfect crime.”
But the Leopold and Loeb case, however sensational, was only one of countless crime stories that dominated the news. Every day, from coast to coast, the papers were packed with tales of murder and rape, arson and assault, burglary, banditry, and blackmail. On a single day in 1925, every column on the first two pages of the Chicago Tribune was devoted to crime. During an average week in the summer of that same year, San Franciscans would have encountered the following headlines in the pages of the Chronicle: CASHIER SLAIN AT DESK AS WIFE MOURNS HER DEAD SON, BODY FOUND IN GAS-FILLED ROOM LINKED TO GIRL SLAYING, MODESTO WIFE MAKES CHARGE OF TORTURE, HIKERS FIND BODY OF MAN ON BEACH, MADMAN SETS OFF NITRO BOMB IN BANK, GIRL’S DEATH IN “LOVE PILL” CASE INVOLVES OHIO STUDENT, SHOTS FIRED INTO CHURCH KILL PASTOR AND WOMAN, ASYLUM ESCAPEE ADMITS MURDERS, “DIAMOND GIRL” SHOT IN DUAL TRAGEDY, “ACID BRIDE” BEGINS 14-YEAR TERM IN SAN QUENTIN, FIFTH MAN SLAIN IN LIQUOR WAR, FATHER FACES GALLOWS IN SLAYING OF DAUGHTER.
In one editorial cartoon after another, the crisis was depicted in dark, dramatic imagery: Uncle Sam being held up at gunpoint by a thug named “Crime.” The figure of Liberty choking on poison from a bottle labelled “Crime.” A map of America inundated with a great, black wave titled “Crime.”
In the view of certain pundits, the phrase “crime wave” was a slight misnomer. The problem, they argued, was less like a sudden, overwhelming wave than “a steadily rising tide.” But whichever aquatic metaphor they preferred, most observers agreed that, in the words of a special report issued by the American Bar Association, “the criminal situation in the United States so far as crimes of violence are concerned is worse than in any other civilized country.” The statistical evidence was shocking. During the ten-year period ending in 1923 (according to the ABA report), 100,000 Americans “perished by poison, pistol, knife, or other unlawful and deadly injury.” In 1923 alone there were 10,000 homicides in the United States. The following year, the figure topped 11,000. A single major city, St. Louis, had more murders during 1924 than England and Wales combined.
As for lesser crimes, the figures were equally staggering. In 1919, Chicago had 2,000 more burglaries than London. That same year, there were close to 1,100 cases of armed robbery in St. Louis, as opposed to 29 in all of France. Thieves made off with 2,327 automobiles in Cleveland during 1924. In Liverpool, a city one and a half times the size of Cleveland, the total number of stolen cars for that year was 10. And so on.
From the perspective of the 1990s, there is something perversely reassuring about these figures, since they suggest that the moral fabric of our nation may not be degenerating as dramatically as the doomsayers claim. But back in the 1920s, they were only a cause for alarm. To Americans of that era, particularly the older generation, the burgeoning crime rate was terrifying proof that the country, unloosed from its moorings in the Victorian code of the pre-War era, was plunging into moral chaos.
The popular magazines of the period were full of ruminations on the “crime problem.” From The American Mercury to The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s to The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s to Current History, the periodicals of the day were packed with articles like “Crime and Punishment,” “Crime and Society,” “The Crime Complex,” “Poverty and Crime,” “What Makes a Criminal,” “Inside the Criminal Mind,” “Combating Crime,” “The Scientific Treatment of Crime,” “The Persistence of Crime,” and many more.
Encountering these articles now, a reader is struck by how contemporary they sound. Remove their references to “bootleg brigands,” Leopold and Loeb, and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, and they might have been published in yesterday’s Washington Post. Virtually all the writers agreed, for example, that a primary cause of the 1920s crime explosion was the frightening proliferati
on of handguns. “Americans carry more revolvers than all the people of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined,” one writer noted in the Boston Globe. “This one fact alone causes more violent crime than all other factors put together.” A Chicago judge painted an even more hair-raising picture of the problem. “It is almost armed insurrection that confronts the nation,” he declared.
Another alarming aspect of the 1920s crime epidemic was the shocking rise in youthful offenders. “Within the last fifteen years,” according to a columnist for the Indianapolis News, “the average age of persons committing crimes of violence has decreased ten years. In former times, most of the burglars, safe robbers, and hold-up men were hardened criminals. Today, the worst offenders are young men. Not infrequently, mere boys begin a career of crime as hold-up men.” What was behind this disconcerting phenomenon? “Only one conclusion is inevitable,” the columnist wrote. “Children are not being instructed, trained and disciplined as they ought to be.”
As for remedies, the proposals put forth sounded much like today’s. Many believed that handguns should be subject to strict state and federal regulations that would make “the sale of fire-arms as difficult as that of opium.” “The pistol, made only to kill people, must go!” proclaimed an editorial in the Atlanta Constitution. “The indiscriminate carrying of pistols is the greatest menace to human life and law and order, and the most distressing instrument of homicide known to our civilization.”
Others insisted that the only cure for the crime plague was a revival of traditional family values. “There must be a return to good old-fashioned virtues that were practiced in the home,” declared the Troy Record. “There is less crime in England than in America because over there all children are brought up with an inherent respect for the law.”
Then there were those who advocated harsher penalties for criminals. “The only way to stop crime is to punish the guilty and do it quickly, firmly and severely,” wrote an editorialist in the Boston Globe.
The trouble at present is that we are spending millions of dollars and valuable time in providing ways to “reform” criminals and make it easier for persons who ought to be in jail to escape the law. A whole army of criminal experts, probation officers, and publicity-seeking judges are trying to educate the public to the idea that no crime deserves real punishment. They are full of theories for coddling criminals and excuses for bandits, thugs, and the lawless generally. And they are spending good money to this end.
There is no new way to deal with criminals. The experience of centuries has shown that tolerance is fatal. No lawbreaker fears anything but swift and certain punishment. He can’t be turned from his evil ways by appeals to his “better nature.” He needs but one lesson—stern justice.
Let citizens, juries, and judges do their duty fearlessly and strictly. Put the criminals where they belong. Stop this nonsense of coddling lawbreakers. Get back to sane justice. That’s the only medicine for the disease.
While all this sounds remarkably familiar, there is one area where things have changed dramatically, and for the better, since the mid-1920s. In considering the reasons for America’s egregious “crime record,” many commentators pointed to the appalling performance of the nation’s police. The record seemed to speak for itself. For the 2,825 serious crimes reported in Baltimore during the first six months of 1923, for example, only 724 arrests were made and fewer than 500 people indicted. The following year, St. Louis had a total of 13,444 reported felonies, 964 arrests, and just 624 indictments—less than one indictment for every twenty crimes. “The deterrence of penal treatment can have little effect,” one writer noted dryly, “if a prospective criminal believes that, even if his crime is discovered, there is less than one chance in twenty of his being brought to trial.”
Incompetence and corruption were only part of the problem. Another was the primitive state of police science in this country. Compared to the law-enforcement systems of the major European nations, America’s police departments seemed to be operating in the Dark Ages. Various specialists, among them George W. Kirchwey—former warden of Sing Sing and dean of Columbia Law School—pointed to the great technical sophistication of European investigators who were” trained to examine with a high degree of skill every detail connected with a crime and to rely on scientific experts at every turn. Nothing is too minute for examination and study. The investigating officer therefore spares no pains to seek for the slightest clue—even a single hair caught on the hands of the victim, lodged upon some piece of clothing, or fallen on the ground nearby. Thus, in a recorded case in Austria, a man was gravely wounded by an unknown person on a very dark night. The criminal dropped his cap in his flight, and inside the cap two hairs were found. After a careful examination, the expert microscopist was able to describe the wearer as a ‘man of middle age, of robust constitution, inclined to obesity; black hair intermingled with gray, recently cut; commencing to grow bald.’”
By way of comparison, Kirchwey described the treatment of one of the key pieces of evidence in the Sacco-Vanzetti case—a cap, allegedly belonging to Nicola Sacco, found at the murder scene in South Braintree, Massachusetts. “Upon the identification of its wearer hung an issue of nation-wide concern,” Kirchwey observed. And how did the Braintree police handle it? Chief Jerome Gallivan stuck the cap under the front seat of his automobile, where it lay for nearly two weeks, then ripped open the lining with his bare hands in the hope of finding some kind of identification mark.
If there was one bright spot in this dismal picture of Keystone Kops forensics, it could be found in California, which boasted the nation’s oldest State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation. Established in 1917, this centralized agency kept voluminous files—including fingerprints, mug shots, physical descriptions, and arrest records—on thousands of criminals. In addition, it maintained a highly trained staff of specialists in microscopy, handwriting, chemistry, photography, ballistics, fingerprinting, etc. In every area, the bureau had proven its worth. In 1927, for example, maintenance of the bureau cost the taxpayers $37,776, as against $1,253,205 of stolen property recovered and returned to its rightful owners.
Its success in dealing with “migratory criminals,” felons who eluded the law by moving from city to city and state to state, had been especially striking. During the first decade of its existence, more than 7,000 men picked up on minor charges by various small-town police departments had been identified by the bureau as fugitives from other states—murderers, escaped convicts, bank robbers, and bunko men—and returned for imprisonment.
Writing in the monthly magazine Current History, Superintendent C. S. Morrill gave a vivid illustration of his bureau’s achievements. On the evening of July 29, 1926, while magician Charles Joseph Carter—known as “Carter the Great”—was mystifying a San Francisco audience with his world-famous vanishing act, $14,000 worth of jewelry vanished from his apartment. Within forty-eight hours, the State Criminal Identification Bureau had ascertained that the stolen jewelry was being peddled in Nevada. Travelling to Nevada, city detectives were able to recover most of the loot and arrest four “well-known migratory criminals,” the burglar and three accomplices.
“The recovery of the jewels and apprehension of the criminals were possible because California has broken down the barrier of isolation that surrounds the police of many states,” Morrill wrote with quiet pride. “California’s centralized crime bureau reaches out from city to city and state to state to gather information for her otherwise isolated police units and to coordinate their efforts in apprehending migratory criminals.”
Ironically, at the very moment that the California crime bureau was helping to crack the Carter jewelry heist, it was faced with another, far more frightening case involving a “migratory criminal.” Already, he had thrown several cities into a panic. Assisted by the bureau, police throughout the state were doing everything possible to identify this shadowy figure. Their failure would make Superintendent Morrill’s boasts about California’s system seem
painfully hollow, though the bureau’s forensic experts couldn’t really be blamed.
When it came to burglars, robbers, check forgers, even run-of-the-mill murderers, the bureau had an impressive record of success. But the crimes that commenced in early 1926 represented a phenomenon so unparalled that, even in the nation that Morrill called “the most crime-infested society on earth,” nothing quite like them had ever been seen.
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Francis Quarles, “Emblems”
This house is to be let for life or years; Her rent is sorrow, and her income tears.
Sixty-year-old Clara Newman was a person of means, a shrewd, tough-minded woman who had managed to turn a small inheritance into a considerable fortune by her canny investments in real estate. In 1926, she owned property in several states, including two houses in San Francisco and a big spread in Pennsylvania.
From her manner of living, a stranger would never have guessed at her wealth. Parsimonious by nature, the “aged spinster” (as the newspapers would soon be describing her) dressed simply, subsisted on a meager diet, and inhabited a few sparsely furnished rooms on the ground floor of her house at 2037 Pierce Street. Though her mind was keen as ever, Miss Newman was physically frail and required help in managing her affairs. She received it from her nephew, Merton Newman, Sr., who also lived in the Pierce Street house, occupying two second-story rooms with his wife and nineteen-year-old son.
The top floor of the house was divided into two modest apartments. One of these was tenanted by a couple named Brown. The other had been vacant since the start of the New Year. For nearly two months, Miss Newman had been trying to rent it, displaying a hand-lettered “Room to Let” sign in the big bay window fronting Pierce Street.
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