Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  On the morning of Saturday, February 20, 1926, Merton Newman was alone in his second-floor apartment, his wife and son having gone out on an errand. Shortly before noon, he heard the doorbell chime. Glancing up from his newspaper, Newman could make out some muffled sounds from below—his aunt going to the front door and exchanging a few words with the caller. Then Merton returned to his reading.

  About fifteen minutes later, he laid down his paper. It was chilly in the apartment. The temperature outside was hovering at around forty-eight, but the radiators were stone-cold. He decided to go down to the basement and check the furnace, which had been acting up lately.

  The stairs to the cellar ran down from a door in the kitchen. Crossing the kitchen, Merton noticed a half-cooked sausage in a frying pan on the stove. The burner beneath the pan was off. Apparently the caller had caught his aunt in the middle of preparing her lunch, and she had turned off the gas before answering the door.

  Merton spent about fifteen minutes in the cellar, tinkering with the furnace, before heading back up to the first floor. As he left the kitchen and stepped into the central hallway, he spotted something—a strange figure walking briskly towards the back door. Merton called out to the man, who paused with a hand on the doorknob and glanced over his shoulder. In the shadowy corridor, Merton couldn’t see much of the stranger’s face. The man was rather oddly dressed, in dark, baggy trousers and a drab, military shirt. In spite of the chilly weather, he was coatless. Merton, who judged the man’s age at around thirty, could see that he was powerfully built, not especially tall but deep-chested and stocky.

  “Can I be of assistance?” Merton asked.

  “Tell the landlady I will return in an hour,” the stranger replied. “I would like to rent that empty apartment.” With that, he pulled open the door and strode away.

  Walking to the back door, Merton looked down the street, but the stranger had already disappeared around the corner. Before returning to his rooms, Merton engaged in a brief conversation with two workmen who were doing repairs on the roof of a neighboring house. Merton called up to them, asking them to stop by and see him once they were done with their job; his aunt’s roof needed some patching. “All right,” one of the men shouted back. “We will drop by before going home.”

  Shutting the back door, Merton returned to his second-floor apartment and, within moments, had become absorbed in some bookkeeping.

  It was almost 2:00 P.M. when he laid down his ledger book and went downstairs in search of his aunt, intending to discuss the possibility of replacing the antiquated furnace. As he passed through the kitchen again, Merton noticed something strange. The frying pan with the unheated sausage was still on the stove.

  He walked to his aunt’s bedroom. The door was open, and Merton could see at a glance that his aunt was not inside. He checked the other rooms on the first floor, but she was nowhere to be found.

  Puzzled, he ascended to the third floor and knocked on the door of the Browns’ apartment. Charles Brown answered. Yes, he confirmed, both he and his wife had heard Miss Newman up there a few hours ago, talking with someone. The Browns had assumed that the landlady was showing the vacant apartment to a prospective tenant.

  Stepping across the hallway, Merton tried the knob of the vacant apartment and found that it was locked. That was peculiar. He pounded on the door. Silence. For some reason, his heart was seized with alarm. Taking a step back, he raised one foot and delivered a powerful kick that sent the door crashing open.

  The attic apartment consisted of a single, cramped bedroom and a tiny kitchen, just big enough to accommodate a stove, an icebox, and a sink. Small as she was, Clara Newman’s body covered most of the kitchen floor. She was curled on her left side, naked from the waist down, her housedress having been yanked above her waist. The wooden beads from her old-fashioned necklace lay scattered on the floor.

  Shouting for Brown to call the police, Merton dropped to his knees beside his aunt. He shook her by a shoulder as if to rouse her from a nap, though from her ghastly stillness and the grotesque look on her face, he already knew that the old woman was dead.

  The autopsy took place that evening. Police Surgeon Selby R. Strange concluded that the bruises on the victim’s neck had been made by powerful fingers. Miss Newman’s death, he told reporters, “looked like murder by strangulation.” Three officers—Lieutenant Charles Dullea, along with Detective-Sergeants Allan McGinn and Charles Iredale—were assigned to the case. Fingerprints found on the inside knob of the attic door were photographed by Police Photographer George Blum and sent to the Bureau of Criminal Identification in the hope of finding a match.

  A hard-looking vagrant was picked up in Oakland within twenty-four hours of the killing but, after viewing the man, Miss Newman’s nephew declared that the suspect was “blameless.” The two workmen who had been repairing the neighboring roof at the time of the murder were questioned as witnesses, but neither man had gotten a good look at the suspect.

  The story of Miss Newman’s death—headlined FIEND MURDER OF SPINSTER in the San Francisco Chronicle—made the front page. But at a time when every day brought news of another stabbing, shooting, bombing, or poisoning, it quickly faded from the papers. The old lady’s murder was shocking but not nearly sensational enough to cause widespread consternation.

  The public’s reaction might have been different if Dr. Strange had revealed one appalling detail. Though the surgeon had confirmed that the old lady had been raped—or, as the newspapers put it, “criminally attacked”—he had withheld one fact from the public. The “criminal attack” had been postmortem.

  The unknown fiend who had gained entrance to Miss Newman’s house in the guise of a renter had committed a double outrage on the sixty-year-old spinster. First, he had throttled her to death. Then he had raped her corpse.

  10

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  L. C. Douthwaite, Mass Murder

  Earle Nelson was of the type of human wolf who, once having tasted blood, becomes possessed with a lust for killing which cannot be gainsaid.

  Though officially retired from the real-estate business, Harvey J. Beal kept an office in downtown San Jose where he spent a few hours each week overseeing his investments. At approximately 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday, March 2, 1926, he kissed his wife, Laura, goodbye and left their ground-floor residence in the Deer Park Apartments, a four-story building in a fashionable residential district of town.

  The building itself, at 521 East Santa Clara Street, was actually owned by Mrs. Beal. At that time, all the apartments were occupied except one, a recently vacated, furnished one-bedroom on the third floor. Mrs. Beal, who managed the property, had hung out a “Room to Let” sign just a few days earlier.

  In addition to her duties as landlady, Laura Beal was active in church work and as the leader of the local branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. By all accounts, she was a sweet-tempered soul. The photograph of her that would run in the following day’s Chronicle shows a woman whose strong, slightly mannish features are softened almost to loveliness by her gentle expression. The picture highlights something else, too: Mrs. Beal’s one, truly elegant feature—her long, lovely neck, as graceful as a flower stem.

  When Harvey Beal returned home shortly before 6:00 P.M., the door to his apartment was open. He called to his wife as he entered the front hallway, but, surprisingly, she wasn’t home. Inside the living room, he found his wife’s reading glasses lying atop the afternoon newspaper at the foot of her favorite easy chair. Assuming that she had gone over to a neighbor’s and would return momentarily, he went into the kitchen and fixed himself a sandwich.

  Mr. Beal was not a worrier, but when an hour passed with no sign of his wife, he began to grow concerned. He checked with the other residents of the building, but none of them had seen his wife all day. One of the tenants, however—a woman named Florence Turner—had noticed the door of the Beals’ apartment standing open as early as 4:00 P.M.

  When he heard this information, Mr. Beal�
�s emotions quickly passed from concern to alarm. Enlisting the aid of his tenants, he began a search of the entire neighborhood, but Laura Beal was nowhere to be found.

  By ten, the frantic man was at a loss. There was only one place left to look—the vacant, third-floor apartment. Mr. Beal had already tried the door earlier that evening but had found it locked. Now, fetching the spare key from his wife’s bureau, he hurried back up to the apartment, opened the door, and stepped inside.

  He found his wife’s body sprawled across the mattress in the bedroom. From the condition of the room, and the dreadful bruises on her face, he could see that there had been a violent struggle. She had been strangled with the silken cord from her dressing gown, which had been twisted so savagely around her neck that it was embedded in her flesh. Her garments were hiked to her waist. It was clear that the sixty-five-year-old woman had been sexually assaulted, though it wasn’t until the autopsy that Coroner Amos Williams determined she had been raped after death.

  The page-one story in the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle, headlined FIEND MURDERER STRANGLES WOMAN IN SAN JOSE HOME, sent shock waves throughout the area. As the story noted, the appalling murder of Mrs. Beal appeared to be the work of the “same fiend who two weeks ago strangled a woman in similar circumstances in San Francisco.”

  That conjecture was confirmed late Wednesday afternoon by Mr. H. S. Bailey, proprietor of an ice cream parlor directly across the street from the Beals’ apartment building. Questioned by police, Bailey recalled that he had spotted a sallow-faced man hurrying from the building at around 4:30 P.M., the approximate time of the murder according to the findings of Coroner Williams. Bailey’s description matched the one provided by Merton Newman, nephew of the fiend’s previous victim, who had travelled to San Jose to assist with the investigation. Bailey was immediately taken to the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation where, as the papers reported, he was shown photographs of “every degenerate known to police” in the hope that he would be able to identify the culprit.

  In the meantime, the San Jose police turned for advice to a specialist in abnormal psychology, Dr. L. E. Stocking, head of a local mental hospital, who declared authoritatively that the killer was unquestionably “a maniac possessing extreme criminal cunning.”

  The news that a homicidal maniac was at large in San Jose set off a full-blown panic, particularly among the city’s female population. The police were inundated with phone calls from women reporting close encounters with the fiend. Some of these callers were landladies, like Mrs. F. C. Rochester of the Melrose apartments, who claimed that, the previous Friday, a “suspicious character” had appeared at her door to apply for a job as a handyman. Something about his appearance made Mrs. Rochester so nervous that, excusing herself, she ran to a neighbor’s for help. By the time she and the neighbor returned, however, the mysterious stranger had fled. Unfortunately, the detailed physical description she gave to police did not tally at all with the strangler’s known attributes.

  Like Mrs. Rochester’s story, most of the ostensible “leads” that flooded police headquarters in the days following Laura Beal’s murder were utterly useless, either facts that had no bearing on the case or sheer, overwrought fantasy. In spite of their dubious quality, however, at least two of these tales were taken seriously. One came from a woman named Mrs. D. L. Currier of 33 Hester Avenue, who reported that, on Friday afternoon, while napping in her bedroom with her four-year-old son, she became aware of a strange noise and opened her eyes to see “an unkempt man standing over her.”

  Screaming in terror, she leapt from her bed and fled the room “with the fiend in close pursuit.” He managed to seize the hem of her nightdress, ripping off a strip of the garment as she bolted for the front door. She had just pulled open the door when the maniac overtook her. Gripping her in his powerful arms, he stuffed a pocket handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her cries, then wound the torn strip of nightdress around her neck, preparing to strangle her. Struggling wildly, Mrs. Currier managed to wrest herself out of his grasp but, in doing so, fell across the threshold, struck her head on the doorframe, and—as she explained to the police—was “rendered unconscious.” When she awoke sometime later, the fiend, apparently fearing “that passersby might be attracted should he attempt to carry out his nefarious purpose in public view,” had fled.

  Later that same afternoon, Miss Ethel Ehlert was alone in her father’s plumbing shop at 1060 Alameda when, in her words, a “tall man of uncouth appearance, with several days’ growth of beard on his face” entered the store. When Miss Ehlert asked what he wanted, he stepped up to the counter, looked at her with “an evil leer,” and responded, “Nothing.”

  Suddenly, he lunged across the counter, seized her wrists, and tried to drag her into his arms. Yanking herself free of his grasp, she dashed to the end of the counter towards the rear door “with the fiend in pursuit.” Bursting into the alley, Miss Ehlert, according to her account, sped around to the front of the building, ran back into the store, slammed and locked the door, then raced to the back door and threw the latch—just as the fiend, who had chased her all around the building, came rushing up. Pressing his “ugly face” to the door pane, he “stood there leering” at her until he saw her snatch up the telephone to summon the police, at which point he “took to his heels and fled.”

  The wild-eyed accounts of Mrs. Currier and Miss Ehlert, blazoned as unvarnished truth on the front page of Saturday’s Chronicle, plunged the citizens of San Jose into a state of near hysteria. “San Jose homes were in the grip of terror,” the paper reported. “Women are keeping behind locked doors. Children are not being permitted to leave the house alone. Men are secretly arming themselves.”

  Given this frenzied state of affairs, the whole city must have heaved a sigh of relief when Sunday’s edition hit the stands. STRANGLER MANIAC SUSPECT JAILED BY SAN JOSE POLICE read the headline.

  A police detective named Thomas Short made the arrest late Saturday afternoon. The suspect was a thirty-three-year-old Austrian immigrant named Joe Kesesek whose description tallied closely with that of the “strangler maniac”—dark hair, olive complexion, barrel chest, unusually long arms. When Short spotted him “acting suspiciously” on Market Street, Kesesek was dressed in a drab army shirt, the same kind of garment that the strangler was wearing when he fled Clara Newman’s house in San Francisco.

  Taken into custody, Kesesek (as Short later explained to reporters) began talking “in a rambling manner, all of his talk being about women.” At times, his speech was so garbled that the detective couldn’t begin to understand it—a sure sign, as far as Short was concerned, that the man was dangerously unbalanced.

  While the suspect was being booked, two other detectives proceeded to 53 Market Street, a dingy little fleabag that Kesesek had given as his address. But if the cops hoped to discover evidence that would link the Austrian to either murder, they came away disappointed. All they managed to turn up in Kesesek’s room were five dollars in cash, a key, and a letter—written in German—to a woman named Mary Ritter.

  Back in the stationhouse, Kesesek, whose babbling clearly had less to do with his presumed mental pathology than with sheer terror at being collared as the strangler suspect, had calmed down sufficiently to give a perfectly lucid account of his recent history to Police Chief John Black. According to Kesesek, he had been working as a handyman in the Veterans’ Home near Sawtelle until two weeks earlier, when he decided to go to San Francisco to seek treatment for his asthma. Along the way, he had stopped off at a hospital in San Luis Obispo, where a doctor had given him some medicine for his condition. The medicine bottle had, in fact, been found in Kesesek’s possession at the time of his arrest.

  Continuing his journey northward, Kesesek had encountered a traffic officer outside Salinas. At that point, Kesesek—who had been travelling by foot when he couldn’t thumb a ride—was flat broke. He appealed to the policeman, who gave him five dollars out of his own pocket for a room. Kesesek ar
rived in San Jose early Saturday morning and immediately rented a bed in the Market Street flophouse. After settling into his squalid quarters, he had gone out for a stroll and was promptly identified as the “strangler maniac” by Detective Short, although—as Kesesek now insisted—he was nowhere near San Jose on the previous Tuesday when Laura Beal’s murder had occurred.

  The day after Kesesek related this story, Monday, March 8, 1926, several witnesses came forward who confirmed every portion of his alibi. The Austrian was back on the street before noon.

  By the time of his release, rumors had begun circulating that the real “strangler maniac” had been seen leaving the city on the afternoon of the murder with an unknown companion. According to witnesses, the two men had been hiking southward over Monterrey Boulevard.

  It was alarming, of course, to think that the fiend had escaped, but at least San Jose was rid of him—a comforting thought to the citizenry.

  As the days and weeks passed without further incidents, San Franciscans began breathing easier, too. Though the vicious killer of two elderly landladies remained at large, it seemed clear that he had left the Bay Area.

  But he hadn’t left. He was only taking a respite—and it wouldn’t last long.

  11

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  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

  Thus speaks the red judge, “Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob.” But I say unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery.

  Every afternoon around 2:00 P.M. Mrs. Lillian St. Mary put on her hat and coat and went out to do her daily shopping. The sixty-three-year-old San Francisco woman, who had been separated from her husband for a dozen years, lived at 1073 Dolores Street with her adult son, James, a secretary for an official of the Southern Pacific Railroad. To bring in extra income, Mrs. St. Mary rented the spare rooms in her large, private house. Two of them were vacant in the summer of 1926. The others were occupied by boarders, a couple named Van der Zee and Mr. R. C. Brian, who worked in a local printing shop.