Others, however, weren’t so sure, particularly after some recent stains that turned out to be a mix of blood and saliva were discovered on the pillow of Mrs. Withers’ bed. In spite of Tackaberry’s certainty, police pressed on with their investigation, bringing in various people for questioning, including Bob Frentzel (whose blue coupe had reportedly been seen in front of the Withers home on the morning of the murder) and the former husband of the dead woman, Mr. Charles Withers of Seattle, who himself was highly dubious of the suicide theory. “I do not believe she would have done such a thing,” declared Mr. Withers, who, like Frentzel, turned out to have an airtight alibi.
Other people acquainted with Beata Withers shared her ex-husband’s point of view. One of her neighbors, for example—a woman named Miriam Wright—had spoken to Mrs. Withers just hours before her death. “She was working out in the yard in her dahlias,” Mrs. Wright told reporters. “She appeared unusually happy, talking about her plans for her garden this winter and next spring. Why, it seems impossible that a few hours later she would have crawled into the trunk and committed suicide.”
Police agreed that Mrs. Withers, “apparent happy attitude” argued against suicide. Still, as Deputy Coroner Ross pointed out, “such a mental attitude on the part of one who is about to take his or her own life is not unknown.”
And indeed, as their investigation continued, police began to uncover convincing reasons why Beata might have been driven to suicide. According to some of her friends, the thirty-two-year-old divorcée had been in desperate financial straits, deeply in debt and in danger of losing her house. In an effort to generate income, she had decided to take in boarders. Indeed, just a few days before her death, she had placed a “Room to Let” ad in the Morning Oregonian.
The most explosive evidence of all, however, was a personal notebook discovered in the top drawer of Beata Withers’ bedroom bureau. This so-called “love diary” (as the tabloids immediately tagged it) was a fervid chronicle of her ill-fated love affair with Bob Frentzel, who was revealed to be a thoroughgoing cad, having lied to Mrs. Withers about his marital status.
The first entry, dated January 11, 1925, describes her initial meeting with her seducer: “It is just two years ago New Year’s Eve that I first went out with Bob. I met him through-----, when she brought him out to the house, and it was a case of love at first sight, at least for me.”
Only a few nights later, she is already permitting Bob to make love to her (though, in the parlance of the time, to “make love” was a more innocent activity than it is today, involving passionate wooing, not consummated sex).
Well, Bob and I had a wonderful time, and he put me in a taxi and took me home after the show. I remember it was bitter cold out and on the way home, he took me on his lap and made love to me. Me, who had never let any man make love to me before except Charles, and then not until I had known him for over three years! Yes, I had fallen so desperately in love that it seemed the perfectly right thing for me to let him love me.
When we got home, I made some hot chocolate and we sat over the cups for a while and talked, wholly absorbed in one another. Bob told me he was divorced and had a little girl. Even told me where he got his divorce, which I believe he said was either in Haley, Idaho or in Caldwell, Idaho.
It isn’t long, however, before this blissful account takes a sudden, melodramatic turn when Mrs. Withers discovers that her lover has been deceiving her all along.
I had always been lonely, looking for the person who would understand me as well as I thought he did. Poor little me. How happy we can be when ignorance is bliss. I sit here night after night, day after day, without a friend who wants to know me any more, because they all know that Bob is married and living with his wife. Dear God! How I have repented, only too late, for he has been my ruin!
The diary ends on an ominous note, with the poor woman exclaiming “how terrible it is to be killed by this slow process” and wondering darkly how and when she will ever “come out of it.”
* * *
For days the Withers case was the biggest news in town, overshadowing every other local story. So bizarre was the Portland “trunk death mystery” that it was reported in newspapers as far away as San Francisco, though the Chronicle relegated it to its daily “Oddities in the News” feature, lumping it together with other believe-it-or-not items: the prediction of a prominent Parisian designer, M. Martin, who foresaw a time when fashionable gentlemen would dress in décolleté garb; the discovery of two little girls living in a wolf’s den near a Bengalese village; and the announcement by London attorney Mansfield Robinson that he had established a telepathic link with a Martian woman named “Opestinipitia Secomba” who kept him apprised of the latest news from the red planet. Weird and intriguing as the Withers case was, it seemed remote from the immediate concerns of San Franciscans, who were far more interested in a story that broke on the very day that the Portland woman’s body was discovered.
The story emanated from San Jose, where another suspect in the “Dark Strangler” murders had been identified and arrested. And this time the police were absolutely certain that they had the right man. His name was J. E. Ross. On Tuesday, October 19, under the pretense of being a salesman, he had gained entrance to the house of Mrs. A. Di Fiori of 181 Fruitvale Avenue, then raped her at gunpoint. Before fleeing in his automobile, he had warned her not to inform the police. “Remember what happened to the other women who squealed,” he had said.
In spite of this threat, Mrs. Di Fiori went directly to the police, who quickly arrested Ross, already a suspect in another assault, the August 23 rape of a woman named Edna Johnson in her Delmas Avenue home. Inside Ross’ car, detectives found a bludgeon, fashioned from a lead pipe wrapped in sacking, and several articles of clothing which, according to police, “were there to effect a quick disguise.” Even more incriminating were certain remarks Ross made under questioning that seemed to connect him to the stillunsolved murder of Laura Beal the previous March.
The very next day, Sheriff George W. Lyle made a riveting announcement. He would “positively be able to link” Ross not only to the attacks on Mrs. Di Fiori and Mrs. Johnson but to the killing of Laura Beal. On Wednesday, October 20, the San Francisco Chronicle trumpeted the news: a San Jose man had been positively identified as the notorious strangler.
But Sheriff Lyle’s announcement turned out to be precipitous. J. E. Ross may have been a serial rapist, but he was not the “Dark Strangler”—as new and alarming events up in Portland were about to prove.
17
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L. C. Douthwaite, Mass Murder
Slowly, the police put two and two together, obtained the correct answer, and made the cautious pronouncement that perhaps the Dark Strangler was at work in Portland.
On Thursday, October 21, just one day after the discovery of Beata Withers’ body, another Portland woman, a fifty-nine-year-old landlady named Virginia Grant, had been found dead in the basement of one of her properties, a vacant house at 604 East Twenty-second Street. The circumstances of her death seemed highly suspicious. Her corpse was found behind the furnace—as though it had been placed there in a deliberate act of concealment—and two diamond rings, valued at several hundred dollars apiece, were missing from her fingers.
Nevertheless, the immediate judgment of the investigating officers was that the elderly woman had died of natural causes, possibly a heart attack.
Mrs. Grant’s children were justifiably outraged at this finding and demanded that the police treat their mother’s death as a homicide. Still, the case generated very little attention compared to the controversy surrounding the sensational “trunk death mystery.” More remarkably still, no one seemed to draw a connection between the cases, even though the initial report of Mrs. Grant’s death appeared on page one of Friday’s Oregonian, directly adjacent to its daily update on the Withers investigation.
When Mabel Fluke turned up dead on Saturday afternoon, however, even the Portland police were finally compe
lled to admit that something sinister might be going on in their city.
The only daughter of prosperous Portland businessman William MacDonald, Mabel Fluke was raised in privileged circumstances. Her recent life, however, had been marked by hardship. After twelve contented years of marriage, her husband, Robert, had been stricken with cancer. The stress of caring for him and of witnessing his rapid decline had taken a toll on her own health, too. Still, she seemed surprisingly girlish at thirty-seven—a slight, pretty woman with a perfectly oval face, milky complexion, and dark, strikingly large eyes.
In the spring of 1925, the couple had sold their ranch in Independence, Oregon, and returned to Portland, purchasing a two-story house in the Sellwood district at 1521 East Twenty-first Street. Fronting the Eastmoreland golf links, the house was a tidy, wood-frame affair with three rooms on the ground floor and, on the second, two more rooms plus a small, unfinished attic. Less than a year after moving into the place, however, Robert Fluke succumbed to his illness.
At her parents’ insistence, Mabel had moved back to the family estate in St. Johns, occupying a small bungalow on the property. Though her husband’s death was a devastating loss, the young widow refused to retire from life. Her delicate frame and fragile health belied her strength of character. Enrolling in a local business school, she undertook a course in stenography. And she decided to become a landlady, renting out and overseeing the upkeep of her former home in Sellwood.
Several parties had occupied the house since the summer. The most recent tenant, a travelling salesman, had stayed there for only three weeks before leaving in the second week of October. On Saturday, October 16, several days after his departure, Mabel had placed an ad in the Morning Oregonian: “5-ROOM bungalow, completely furnished, electric range, garage on paved street. Reasonable to responsible party. 1521 E. 21st S. There Wednesday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.”
Very early Wednesday morning, before her parents had awakened, Mabel left St. Johns and headed out to Sellwood, intending to do some housecleaning before any prospective tenants arrived. Along the way, she stopped at the plumbing establishment of Leroy Crouchley, who had been hired to install a sewer connection on the property. Mrs. Fluke complained that Crouchley’s workers had left some of the pipes exposed. Crouchley promised to send someone out to attend to the matter before the end of the day.
At approximately 11:00 A.M., a woman named Emma Schultz, who lived next door to the Fluke house, stepped onto her porch and saw the young widow on her hands and knees, scrubbing her own front porch. Mrs. Schultz called a greeting to Mabel, who looked up from her work and exchanged a few words with the older woman, explaining that she “might go out to the country after renting the house.” Mrs. Schultz—who assumed that Mabel was referring to Independence, Oregon, where Robert Fluke’s family lived—spent a few more minutes chatting before retiring into her house.
Another neighbor, a woman named Newton who lived across the street from the Fluke house, noticed the young widow on several occasions that day, the last time at approximately 1:00 P.M., when Mabel came to the front door to admit a young couple who had just driven up to look at the house. Two hours later, Mrs. Newton glanced out her kitchen window and saw another car pull up. A family of four—father, mother, and two teenage girls—emerged from the car and stepped onto the porch. The husband rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he tried again. After another brief wait, the family held a quick conversation, then climbed back into the car and drove away.
When their daughter failed to return home that evening, Mabel’s parents weren’t alarmed, believing that she had decided either to sleep over in Sellwood or travel on to Independence to visit her husband’s family. By Thursday night, however, William MacDonald was anxious enough to send his son, William Junior, out to Sellwood. The young man returned a few hours later. Mabel wasn’t there, he reported. The house had been locked, but he had managed to wiggle inside through an unlocked basement window.
The elder MacDonald assumed that his daughter had, in fact, continued on to Oregon. Early Saturday morning, however, Miss Marion Fluke, the eighteen-year-old niece of Mabel’s late husband, arrived by train from Independence for a weeklong visit to Portland. Mabel had known of the girl’s trip and had, in fact, written a letter to Marion, promising to greet her at the station. When Mabel failed to appear, however, Marion telephoned the MacDonald home and spoke to William Senior.
“You mean Mabel didn’t go out to Independence?” Mr. MacDonald asked.
“Why, no,” Marion said, surprised. “She said she’d be here to meet my train.”
When Mr. MacDonald hung up the phone, his face was clouded with anxiety. “Something’s happened to Mabel,” he said to his wife.
Minutes later, he was at the St. Johns police station. An officer named C. D. Maxwell was assigned to accompany him to Sellwood. Using Patrolman Maxwell’s skeleton key, the two men entered the house and made a quick search of the downstairs rooms. Lying on the kitchen table were a package of tea, a paper sack containing four eggs, and Mabel’s keyring. They found her purse inside a cabinet drawer. The sight of it made her father’s throat constrict with fear. Clearly, his daughter had not gone off anywhere. A sudden, terrifying image came to him—Mabel’s violated body lying in the ditch that had been dug for the sewer line.
The two men proceeded upstairs. It took only a moment to check the two bedrooms. There was no sign of Mabel in either of them. That left only one place to look. The attic was nothing but a narrow space approximately five feet high and nine feet wide, running the length of the house between the eves and the upstairs hallway. It was accessible through a small, hinged panel in the hall. Officer Maxwell opened the panel. It was pitch black inside the attic, but Maxwell had brought along a flashlight. He thumbed on the switch and aimed the beam inside.
William MacDonald had been wrong about one thing. His daughter’s body wasn’t lying outside in a ditch. She was stretched on her back, clad in the same dress she had been wearing on Wednesday. Her right shoe was still on her foot; the other was lying on the floorboards nearby. She had died of strangulation. Her silk scarf had been wound tightly around her neck and double-knotted on one side. The stench that suffused the cramped little space made it clear that she had been dead for several days.
The discovery of Mabel Fluke’s body, the third mysterious death of a Portland woman in less than a week, sent shock waves through the city. Even the police, who seemed so reluctant to confront the grim truth, admitted that there were significant connections among the cases. All three had occurred in the same section of town, southeast Portland. Each of the women had been offering rooms to let and had recently placed ads in the newspapers. All three bodies had been found in concealed places—crammed inside a steamer trunk, shoved behind a furnace, laid out in a cramped attic.
Mabel Fluke had clearly been strangled, and though opinion remained divided about the other two women, there was a very real possibility that both of them had died the same way. And certain personal items were unaccounted for in each case. Like Virginia Grant, Mabel Fluke had been wearing diamond rings that were missing from her fingers. And her overcoat, like Beata Withers’, was nowhere to be found.
For the first time, the Portland authorities were beginning to make another connection, too. Speaking to reporters on Saturday evening, Police Captain John T. Moore acknowledged that the deaths of Mrs. Withers, Grant, and Fluke bore an unsettling resemblance to the recent spate of killings in California’s Bay Area. He urged that “women stay away from untenanted houses unless accompanied by a man.”
Chief of Police Jenkins issued an even more emphatic warning. “In all of these cases, the women had advertised their places for rent. Whenever a woman has such a place to rent, at least until we find out more about these cases, it is better that she have somebody stay with her until her business is transacted.
“This may frighten many women,” Chief Jenkins concluded. “But it is better that some should be frightened than there should be any more l
ives lost. It appears to me that this is the work of someone who is watching these advertisements.”
Even Detective Tackaberry did an abrupt about-face. After sticking to his trunk-suicide theory for several days, he suddenly declared that “Mrs. Withers and Mrs. Fluke were murdered, without a question. And though I haven’t investigated the Mrs. Grant case as yet, I believe she met her death at the hands of the same person.” Beyond the fact that this person was clearly “of unsound mind,” Tackaberry didn’t speculate about the killer’s identity, though, like Captain Moore, he alluded to the string of landlady murders down in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.
Up in Oregon, of course, most people were unaware of the California crimes. In its Sunday edition, however, the Morning Oregonian filled its readers in on the story. For the first time, the citizens of Portland learned the chilling sobriquet of the fiend who had been terrorizing the Bay cities: the “Dark Strangler.”
Remarkably, however, there were still some officials in Portland who clung tenaciously, if not desperately, to the belief that the deaths of Mrs. Withers, Grant, and Fluke were simply three unrelated tragedies. Though the irreducible facts of the Fluke case—a strangled female corpse concealed in an attic—seemed like a pretty strong indication of foul play, a deputy coroner named Guldransen opined that the unfortunate woman may well have taken her own life by arranging herself on the attic floor, then knotting the scarf about her own neck. The bruises on her elbows, Guldransen explained, had evidently been caused by her “efforts to draw the knots tight, one arm having struck the side wall of the attic, the other the floor.”
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