Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Though Nisbet was held in custody for almost forty-eight hours while police checked his alibi, there seemed little doubt that the killing was the work of the “Dark Strangler,” a supposition that was confirmed when the autopsy revealed evidence of postmortem rape. The press, however, didn’t bother to wait for this finding. On Wednesday morning, hours before the autopsy, the San Francisco Chronicle had already run the dual portrait of the Nisbets under a headline that declared: STRANGLER BRINGS SORROW WHERE HAPPINESS REIGNED.

  Throughout the Bay Area, the news that the “Dark Strangler” had struck once again overshadowed every other story, even the medical status of Rudolph Valentine (who would finally succumb on August 23, setting off a nationwide frenzy among his female devotees that seemed like a large-scale magnification of Stephen Nisbet’s suicidal grief). Under the supervision of Chief Drew, Oakland police launched a massive search, focussing on proprietors of boardinghouses and apartment buildings to see if anyone had been approached by a dark, suspicious stranger inquiring after a room.

  Their investigation turned up two witnesses who appeared to have set eyes on the suspect. One of these was David Atwood, postman for the Nisbets’ neighborhood, who told police that he had seen a strange man loitering outside the Nisbets’ apartment building at around 2:00 P.M. on the day of the murder. Atwood described the man as about forty years old, five feet six inches tall, wearing a dark gray suit and a dark fedora hat. Unfortunately, Atwood hadn’t gotten a very good look at the man’s face, though he had been struck by one, peculiar feature—the stranger’s unsettling half-smile.

  The same “smiling stranger”—as the tabloids immediately tagged him—had been seen by Miss Charlotte Jaffey, one of the Nisbets’ tenants, when she left her apartment to do some shopping at around 2:20 P.M. on Monday. The man, who was standing on the front steps of the building when Miss Jaffey emerged, had muttered something inaudible to her as she passed. Glancing over at him, she had been so unnerved by his weird little smile that she had quickly looked away and hurried down the street.

  While a team of detectives tried to track down the “smiling stranger,” others pursued the physical leads. At first, the towel seemed like a promising clue. Presuming that it belonged to the killer, investigators believed that they might be able to trace it by its laundry marks. But that hope was dashed when Stephen Nisbet identified the murder weapon as a towel from his own kitchen. Nisbet’s information raised a whole new set of questions. Why had his wife been carrying the towel while showing the stranger the vacant flat? Wouldn’t she have left it in the kitchen when she went downstairs to answer the door? And if she hadn’t been carrying it, then how did the strangler get hold of it?

  In the meantime—though Mary Nisbet’s murder seemed to prove that he’d been lying all along—the self-confessed strangler, Paul Cameron, continued to languish in jail. His claims, already highly suspect, were further eroded when investigators determined that on June 24, the day Mrs. Ollie Russell was strangled in Santa Barbara, Cameron had been in Los Angeles, living and working at Salvation Army headquarters. Nevertheless, having declared so unequivocally that Cameron was guilty, District Attorney Clarence Ward appeared loathe to let him go.

  And then, on Thursday, August 19, just three days after Mary Nisbet’s murder, another landlady was strangled.

  This time, the killing took place in Stockton. The victim was Isabel Gallegos, a seventy-six-year-old widow who rented rooms in her weatherbeaten home on Channel Street, not far from the railroad tracks. She was found by a former tenant named C. C. Parlett, who had dropped by the house to pick up his mail.

  As soon as Parlett stepped inside, he saw that something was wrong. The place had been turned upside down—closets ransacked, bureaus emptied, clothes and household objects scattered all over the floors. He found Mrs. Gallegos crumpled in the bedroom, face blue, eyes bulging, a cotton pillowcase twisted tightly around her neck.

  The immediate assumption—shared by the police, press, and public alike—was that the murder was the work of the “Dark Strangler,” who had been lured by the “Room to Let” sign in the victim’s parlor window. That same afternoon, a Stockton landlady named Sadie Powers reported another attack to the police. According to Mrs. Powers, who managed an apartment building at 100 Union Street, a “dark-complexioned” stranger with “bushy eyebrows” had come to the front door, inquiring about the vacancy sign posted on the front of the building. As soon as they were alone in the flat, the man had grabbed her by the arms, then attempted to wrap his hands around her throat. Mrs. Powers, however, put up such fierce resistance that the assailant—whom she described as approximately twenty-five years old, five feet seven inches tall, and weighing 150 pounds—fled.

  Even as police followed up on this lead, however, they were beginning to wonder whether Isabel Gallegos had, in fact, been the victim of the strangler, since the state of the crime scene suggested robbery, not rape-murder, as the main motivation. Mrs. Gallegos’ daughter, Mrs. Jack Meaney of Petaluma, reinforced this theory when she revealed that her mother had a local (and totally erroneous) reputation as a woman of wealth, the type of eccentric old lady who stuffs wads of cash inside her mattress. When the autopsy revealed that Mrs. Gallegos had not, in fact, been subjected to a sexual assault, Police Chief C. W. Potter and other members of the Stockton force were even less inclined to attribute her death to the strangler.

  Once again, the investigation had hit a dead end. However, on Saturday, August 21, another suspect was identified. John Slivkoff was a Russian immigrant whose squat build, swarthy complexion, and sullen looks matched the widely broadcast descriptions of the strangler. A police detective named John Greenhall had spotted Slivkoff loitering on a Sacramento street corner and, noting his resemblance to the mystery killer, had picked him up for vagrancy.

  Greenhall’s suspicions seemed confirmed when—after seeing Slivkoff’s photograph in the newpapers—two landladies, one in Sacramento, the other in San Francisco, came forward to recount frightening encounters with the suspect. According to Mrs. Mary Kent, Slivkoff had showed up at her rooming house the previous year and, after ascertaining that the sixty-year-old woman was all alone, had “attempted to embrace her.” When she fought off his efforts, he threatened her with violence. “Do you know how easily I could choke you to death?” he had growled. The quick-thinking landlady had scared Slivkoff away by persuading him that there were workmen right outside the house.

  Mrs. H. Wallis told police that Slivkoff had appeared at the front door of her lodging house at 914 North Street to inquire about a room. He had acted so strangely, however, that she refused to let him inside, slamming and bolting the door while he stood on the stoop shouting imprecations at her.

  By Sunday, August 22, plans were afoot to transport the prisoner first to Oakland, then to San Francisco, where he would be viewed by various witnesses, including David Atwood and Charlotte Jaffey—the pair who had seen the “smiling stranger” lurking outside Mary Nisbet’s apartment building—and, of course, Merton Newman.

  Even before Slivkoff left Sacramento, two other strangler suspects had materialized: an Oakland man named Ralph Olivera, who showed up at police headquarters and confessed to the Nisbet crime, and Raymond Escovar, alias Raymond Abrego, a ranch hand who was held on suspicion when he showed up at the Marysville stationhouse and declared that he had an overpowering desire “to strangle someone.”

  Wihin twenty-four hours, the statements of both Olivera and Escovar were dismissed as the ravings of cranks. The following day, Tuesday, August 24, efforts to identify John Slivkoff as the strangler fell through when, after viewing the suspect, David Atwood, Charlotte Jaffey, and Merton Newman concurred that the Russian bore no resemblance to the man they had seen. And on Friday, August 27, a Santa Barbara alienist, Dr. N. H. Brush, made official what the rest of the world had already surmised. After examining Paul Cameron, alias Phillip H. Brown, in his Santa Barbara cell, Dr. Brush reported that the prisoner was a lunatic who should be remanded t
o a psychiatric hospital for immediate treatment.

  Precisely six months had passed since the strangler’s first murder, and—though four more elderly landladies had met horrible deaths in that time—investigators were no closer to a solution than they had been in February. On Saturday, August 28, the Oakland police publicly admitted their failure, resorting to arboreal metaphors to sum up their predicament—“stumped,” “up a tree.”

  Only one thing seemed certain. Whoever the strangler was, he clearly possessed a Jekyll-Hyde nature. To win his way into the homes of his victims, particularly at a time when the entire Pacific Coast was on the alert for the mysterious strangler, he would have to be a man who made an exceedingly favorable impression: polite, well-spoken, apparently innocuous.

  Once alone with his prey in a vacant apartment, however, he underwent a terrifying transformation, instantly turning into a lust-driven monster, a creature who murdered and raped with the fury of a beast.

  PART 3

  PREY

  †

  16

  †

  Anon., “Then Laugh”

  Build for yourself a strong box,

  Fashion each part with care.

  When it is as strong as your hand can make it,

  Put all your troubles there.

  Again and again during his sixteen-month murder spree, the strangler’s bloodlust would erupt in a lethal frenzy, then subside for a period lasting anywhere from three to twelve weeks. Nowadays, we recognize this as the classic pattern of serial homicide, officially defined by the FBI as a string of random murders interspersed with “emotional cooling-off periods” of varying duration. But back in 1926, the FBI was still a fledgling organization (J. Edgar Hoover had become its director only two years earlier), and the agent who would coin the phrase “serial murder,” Robert K. Ressler of the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, hadn’t even been born.

  Not that serial murder was a wholly unknown phenomenon. Before the strangler had throttled his first landlady, two of the most ghastly killers of modern times, Fritz Haarmann and Georg Grossmann, were already at work in Weimar Germany. A vampiric monster who battened on teenage boys, Haarmann slaughtered at least two dozen young drifters in the years following World War I. After luring a victim to his lodgings near the Hanover train station, he would set upon and savage his prey, reaching an orgasmic pitch as he chewed through the boy’s throat. Afterwards Haarmann and his lover, a male prostitute named Hans Grans, would dismember the body and peddle the flesh as black-market beef.

  Butchering humans for both pleasure and profit was also Grossmann’s m.o. Night after night, the brutish street vendor would pick up a prostitute, bring her back to his squalid flat in a Berlin slum, then rape her, kill her, and carve up her body. In the chaotic aftermath of the Great War, Grossmann had no trouble peddling his hideous cutlets to his meat-deprived neighbors, who—believing that they were purchasing pork—were transformed into unwitting cannibals.

  In our own country, too, there had already been one celebrated case of serial homicide—that of the nineteenth-century “multimurderer,” Dr. H. H. Holmes, who became America’s bogeyman when he confessed to twenty-seven killings, most of them committed in the labyrinthine depths of his Chicago “Murder Castle,” a Gothic horror house masquerading as a Gilded Age office building. From the moment of his arrest, Holmes (a.k.a. “The Archfiend,” “The Murder Demon,” “The Chicago Bluebeard”) became America’s most talked-about criminal, and his 1895 trial became a nationwide sensation, the O.J. Simpson circus of its day.

  As notorious as he was at the turn of the century, however, Holmes had all but faded from public memory by the 1920s, while the enormities of the two German lust murderers were largely unknown in this country. As a result, when the “Dark Strangler” first materialized in 1926, police were slow to define the phenomenon they were dealing with, since there was no apparent context in which to comprehend the horror. The only comparable case that people continued to remember (indeed, that had long passed into the imperishable realm of myth) was that of Jack the Ripper—and in the fall of ’26, it would finally dawn on one anonymous newspaperman that the monster who was terrorizing the Pacific Coast was a homegrown version of the legendary “Butcher of Whitechapel.” But before that happened, four more women would die.

  Beginning on Thursday, October 21, 1926, when the story first broke in the Morning Oregonian, the city of Portland was transfixed by a spellbinding mystery.

  Two days earlier, at around 3:30 P.M. on Tuesday, a fifteen-year-old boy named Charles Withers, a student at the Benson Polytechnic School, had returned to his house at 815 East Lincoln Street and found that his mother was gone. At first the teenager wasn’t concerned. His mother, a pretty thirty-two-year-old divorcée named Beata, was often out running errands or visiting with friends when he got home from school. He went about his business, expecting her to show up at any moment.

  When she still wasn’t home by suppertime, however, he became worried enough to telephone W. R. “Bob” Frentzel, an intimate friend of his mother’s, who lived just a few blocks away. As soon as Frentzel arrived, the two made a search of the house and discovered that Mrs. Withers’ overcoat was missing along with her hat and pocketbook. Clearly she had gone off somewhere. Frentzel telephoned around to her friends, but none of them had seen or spoken to Beata all day.

  That night, young Charles slept alone in the empty house. Early the following morning, he went to the police station and reported that his mother was missing.

  He spent that day attending his classes, hoping that his mother would be there waiting for him when he got home. As soon as he stepped through the front door, however, his heart sank—he could feel the emptiness of the house even before he confirmed it with a quick tour of the rooms.

  Once again he telephoned Frentzel, who showed up this time with another family friend, a gentleman named Cook. Frentzel proposed that the three do a more thorough check of Mrs. Withers’ wardrobe to see what garments she might have taken with her besides her topcoat and hat.

  The Withers house was a tidy, pleasantly furnished bungalow with two bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, breakfast nook, and bathroom on the ground floor. The second story consisted of a large, unfinished attic. While Charles searched through his mother’s bedroom closet, the two older men ascended to the attic, where Beata Withers stored some of her clothing in a steamer trunk.

  That, as everyone later agreed, was the only good thing that could be said about the tragedy—that the boy had not been present when the ghastly discovery was made.

  It was Frentzel who opened the trunk, while Cook looked over his shoulder. Lifting the heavy lid, Frentzel carefully removed the partitioned tray and set it on the floorboards. The trunk was crammed with clothing, which appeared to be in a surprising state of disarray. Frentzel, who knew Mrs. Withers to be a fastidious woman, would have expected her to fold and store her clothing in a more orderly fashion.

  Reaching into the trunk, he removed a few of the garments—then let out such a startling cry that Cook “just about jumped out of my skin,” as he would later put it. As Frentzel staggered backward a step, Cook peered inside the trunk and gave his own little cry as he saw what his companion had uncovered—a pair of naked female legs, half covered by blouses, skirts, and sweaters.

  The police were called. By the time they arrived, Frentzel and Cook had pulled most of the clothes from the trunk. Inside, Beata Withers’ corpse—naked except for a thin cotton slip bunched up around her armpits—lay curled in the fetal position, one arm shoved between her legs.

  While Deputy Coroner Ross examined the body, Detective James M. Tackaberry and two of his subordinates searched the house for clues. It was Tackaberry who made the discovery that would lead to so much controversy in the coming days. He spotted it hanging on a kitchen wall, a framed little print showing a troop of winged fairies swarming out of an open strongbox. Inscribed above the illustration was a bit of versified inspiration entitled “
Then Laugh”:

  Build for yourself a strong box,

  Fashion each part with care.

  When it is as strong as your hand

  can make it.

  Put all your troubles there.

  Hide there all thought of your failures

  And each bitter cup that you quaff,

  Lock all your heartaches within it,

  Then sit on the lid and laugh!

  Tell no one else its contents, Never its secrets share;

  When you’ve dropped in your care and worry

  Keep them forever there;

  Hide them from sight so completely

  That the world will never dream half;

  Fasten the strong box securely—

  Then sit on the lid and laugh!

  The moment he laid eyes on this doggerel, Tackaberry gave a little grunt—the sound of a man who has just had a brilliant flash of insight. He called to his subordinates and hurried up to the attic.

  By then, Beata Withers’ body was already on its way to the city morgue. At Tackaberry’s orders, one of his men squeezed inside the trunk, reached out a hand and began piling clothes over himself, then managed to work the partitioned tray over himself and somehow close the lid. It was a feat worthy of Houdini, but it persuaded Detective Tackaberry that the theory he had formed in the kitchen was correct. The mystery was solved, as far as he was concerned.

  Beata Withers had suffocated herself by shutting herself inside the trunk, having taken the advice of the anonymous poetaster a little too literally.

  Needless to say, Detective Tackaberry’s theory, announced to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, was greeted with a good deal of skepticism if not outright scorn. Even Tackaberry had to concede that “trunk suicides are rare.” In fact, neither he nor any other member of the Portland P.D. had ever heard of “such a method being used.”

  Still, the detective held stubbornly to his belief, insisting that the dead woman had gotten the idea from the framed bit of poesy in her kitchen. “Mrs. Withers read that motto and took it too seriously,” he declared. “I could not be convinced that it was not murder until I read the poem. Then I tried the trunk to see if a person could do as Mrs. Withers did—enter, arrange the clothing, work the tray in place, and drop the lid. It could be done easily and all suspicion of murder vanished.”