Both these episodes were reported in the San Francisco Chronicle as the work of the “Dark Strangler.” In truth, however, it was impossible to know who had really attacked the two women, or even if it had been the same man. In spite of its inflammatory headline—S.F. WOMAN ATTACKED IN HOME BY STRANGLER—the Chronicle conceded that Mrs. Allen’s description of her assailant did “not tally in many points with that” of the notorious landlady killer. And Mrs. Mullins, who had been jumped from behind, hadn’t gotten a look at her attacker at all.
Indeed, some police officials firmly believed that the strangler was long gone from the Bay Area, which had presumably gotten too hot for him. The recent crimes up in Portland certainly suggested that he had decamped for new hunting grounds. It was more than likely, so these authorities opined, that he had left California for good.
Others, however, including Police Chief O’Brien, believed that it was only a matter of time before the strangler struck again in the Bay City. On Thursday, November 18 (the very day that the Pig Woman was delivering her dramatic sickbed testimony on the other side of the continent), Chief O’Brien’s prediction came true.
The victim was Mrs. William Anna Edmonds, who occupied a spacious, two-story house at 3524 Fulton Street, directly across from Golden Gate Park. The middle-aged widow had been more-or-less housebound for the previous three weeks, having slipped down the main staircase and broken her shoulder blade. Even before the accident, Mrs. Edmonds had been thinking of selling her house and moving into smaller, more manageable quarters. With her husband gone and her grown son Raoul living on his own, the house had come to seem oppressive—too big and empty for a lone, aging woman. As a result, she had recently placed a classified ad in the Chronicle and a “For Sale” sign in one of the big bay windows fronting the park.
At around six on Thursday evening, Raoul arrived at the house to discuss the plans for his mother’s fifty-sixth birthday, which was to fall on the following day. He rang the doorbell but received no response. Puzzled, he walked around to the rear of the house and discovered that the back door was open. That seemed very odd. His mother, nervous under the best of circumstances, had felt even more vulnerable since her accident. She always made sure to lock her doors when she was alone.
Inside the house, Raoul called out to his mother, but she did not reply. Quickly, he began searching the rooms. By the time he reached the second floor, he was already in the grip of alarm. He checked the bedrooms, but they were empty. That left only one place to look, the “radio room,” where his mother liked to relax in her armchair and listen to music on her handsome RCA console.
Trying the door, Raoul was startled to discover it locked. He had never known his mother to lock it before. Doing his best to control the trembling of his hands, he used his pocket knife to jiggle open the lock.
Inside, his mother’s dead body lay sprawled on the floor, her gray hair in a tangle, her ankle-length skirt yanked up to her knees. A closer examination of Mrs. Edmonds’ corpse revealed that the jewelry she normally wore, two diamond rings and a pair of diamond earrings, were missing from her body. The police later ascertained that her purse had also been stolen from her bedroom.
At first, the police hesitated to impute the crime to the “Dark Strangler.” True, the circumstances of the case seemed chillingly familiar, a lone matron murdered in her home after placing a classified ad. But except for two faint bruises on the victim’s neck, there were no apparent signs of a violent struggle. Nor had the killer gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the body. The missing jewelry led some investigators to believe that Mrs. Edmonds had been killed during a robbery.
Three things happened on Friday, however, that dispelled any doubts about the crime. First, a witness came forward—a neighbor named Margery Patch, who appeared at police headquarters early Friday morning. According to Mrs. Patch’s story, at around 1:30 the previous afternoon, she had dropped by Mrs. Edmonds’ house and found the widow in her first-floor sitting room talking to a “strange man.” When Mrs. Edmonds explained that she was “engaged in a business deal” relating to the sale of her house, Mrs. Patch excused herself and left—but not before getting a good look at the stranger. The description she gave the police—well-dressed working man, about thirty-five to forty years old, smooth-shaven, with dark hair and olive complexion—corresponded closely to that of the “Dark Strangler.”
That robbery had not been the motive behind the murder was further confirmed on Friday afternoon when pathologist Z. E. Bolin ascertained that Mrs. Edmonds had not only been throttled to death but sexually assaulted as well.
The most dramatic development of all, however, occurred on Friday evening. At approximately 6:00 P.M., a pregnant, twenty-eight-year-old woman, Mrs. H. C. Murray of 1114 Grove Street, Burlingame, was viciously attacked in her home. This time, there was absolutely no doubt that the culprit was the “Dark Strangler.” Everything about the incident conformed precisely to his previous attacks, except for one crucial difference. Mrs. Murray lived to tell her tale.
She told it to reporters from her hospital bed, where she was recovering from the trauma of the episode. Mrs. Murray’s house had been on the market for the past several months. Like Mrs. Edmonds, she had taken out an ad in the papers. There was also a hand-painted “For Sale” sign planted on the front lawn.
At around five o’clock on Friday evening, while her husband was still at work, someone came to the door.
“He saw the sign and rang the bell,” Mrs. Murray told the newsmen who were gathered at her bedside. “I opened the door. I had not the slightest thought of meeting the strangler, but I always make it a practice to take every precaution when showing strange men the house. I kept a considerable distance from him from the moment I let him in—at least six or eight feet. I also left the front door open.”
The dark-haired man, standing about five feet seven or eight inches tall, looked perfectly presentable. He was dressed in a decent blue serge suit with a white shirt, mustard-colored tie, tan shoes, and brown fedora. Doffing the hat, he began to converse in a polite, well-spoken way that, while not entirely disarming her suspicions, served to put the young woman at her ease.
“He first asked the price of the place,” Mrs. Murray continued, “and then said he would like to look at it. I let him in, and he examined the rooms in much detail. He is evidently very familiar with building and construction, for he used expressions relating to such things that I did not understand myself.”
While touring the rooms, the stranger began chatting about himself, explaining that he was planning to get married in just three days. “This will be my third marriage,” he said. “The first time my wife nagged me to death. The second one I took to dances and would find sitting on the laps of other men.” He gave a bitter grunt. “I couldn’t stand that.”
There was something in his tone that made Mrs. Murray pause and take a closer look at the stranger. “I was curious to see the sort of man the woman was going to get.” She judged his age to be around thirty-two or thirty-five. He was nicely groomed—clean-shaven, his receding black hair neatly trimmed, as though he had just been to the barber. He had thick black eyebrows and an olive complexion, though he was clearly not a foreigner. His two most striking features were his dark, piercing eyes and strong, white, perfectly even teeth.
Though Mrs. Murray did not feel at all threatened by the dark-complexioned stranger, she continued to keep her distance from him as they toured the house, taking care to remain “six or eight feet away from him during the whole interview.” She was struck by the close attention that he paid to certain details—closets, door locks, and especially ceilings. Only in retrospect did she perceive the diabolical cunning behind the stranger’s behavior.
“I realize now,” she told the reporters, “that he was trying to get me to look up towards the ceiling, so that he could get behind me and grab my throat.”
Mrs. Murray had deliberately left all the window shades up. Entering the main bedroom, the stranger s
tepped over to the window and casually put his hand on the shade-pull. “Whoever designed this house sure put the windows in places to give plenty of light,” he said. Then, as if testing to make sure that the roller functioned properly, he pulled down the shade and left it that way.
As Mrs. Murray was quick to admit, she then did something exceptionally foolish, carelessly letting it slip that her husband would not be home from work until around six. Reaching into his pocket, the stranger pulled out his watch and consulted it. “I wonder if I have the right time,” he said, frowning. “My watch has been running kind of slow lately. It says five-thirty.” Checking the alarm clock on her night table, Mrs. Murray confirmed that his watch was accurate.
Propped up on several pillows in her hospital bed, Mrs. Murray (who had just entered her eighth month of pregnancy) paused in her recitation for a sip of water. Then, as if gathering her strength, she drew a deep breath and related the dramatic climax of her tale.
“The final place we inspected was the screened porch in the rear of the house. He seemed particularly interested in this and several times called my attention to the ceiling. I kept my distance, however, though I never once dreamed he was the strangler. After exhausting every pretext for lingering, he started out.
“When he reached the front door, he suddenly turned and said, ‘There’s something about that porch I’d like to see again.’ I returned there with him. As we stepped onto the porch, he suddenly pointed through the screen to the garage outside. ‘What sort of roof is that on the garage?’ he asked.”
The suddenness of the question caught Mrs. Murray off guard. “For the first time, I turned my back to him—and in that instant I felt his hands closing around my neck from the rear.” The realization hit her with sickening force. She was in the grip of the “Dark Strangler.”
But unlike his previous victims, Mrs. Murray was a strapping young woman. Screaming wildly, she tore at his hands with her fingernails. “Fear must have given me strength, for I succeeded in breaking that terrible grip.” Turning on him, she clawed at his face, then threw herself “through the screen door and nearly fell down the steps leading from the porch. Bleeding from his scratches, the strangler turned and dashed through the house, fleeing through the front door.”
Still screaming for help, Mrs. Murray ran to the front of the house, reaching Grove Steet just as the strangler disappeared around a corner. At that moment, an automobile came cruising along the street. “Stop that man!” Mrs. Murray screeched. Instead of giving chase, however, the car slowed down.
Leaping onto the running board, Mrs. Murray began shouting at the driver. “That man! He attacked me! He’s the strangler!” Other neighbors, meanwhile, had come bursting out of their houses to see what the commotion was about. Suddenly, the shock of the episode seemed to hit the pregnant woman in one overpowering blow. Sliding from the car, she collapsed onto the pavement, while a neighbor ran to call the police.
Within the hour, the entire police forces of Burlingame and San Mateo, assisted by a large contingent of armed volunteers, was scouring the area. A cordon was thrown around the entire district. Roadblocks were erected, vehicles stopped, passengers checked. A posse of men armed with shotguns patrolled the wood and marshes. Hospitals and doctors were alerted, in the event that the killer sought medical treatment for the injuries Mrs. Murray had inflicted. In spite of these efforts, however, the “Dark Strangler” managed to slip away again.
With the killer on the loose somewhere in the Bay Area, San Francisco Police Chief O’Brien called a press conference the following morning. Calling the strangler “the most dangerous criminal now at large,” Chief O’Brien urged “women who have houses for sale or rooms for rent to use the utmost caution in admitting strangers of the general description of the strangler.” He placed special emphasis on the deceptive, Jekyll-Hyde nature of the man. “He is not of a repulsive appearance. It is a mistake to believe that he has the features of an ape or gorilla, or that he is uncouth in speech or manner. He is able to gain an amicable footing with women through his suave manner.”
With a canniness “typical of criminals of his type,” the strangler had evidently modified his usual m.o. “A month ago,” said the chief, “I figured that it was about time for one of the strangler’s periodical outbreaks in this city, and I asked that an order be issued, instructing members of the department to warn women lodging-house keepers. The strangler seems now to have switched his operations from rented rooms to houses for sale.”
The chief concluded his speech with a grim reminder that “no woman in San Francisco is safe with this man at large. The Police Department is doing everything possible to capture him, but it must have the cooperation of the citizenry to the fullest extent.”
While Chief O’Brien had to strike a delicate balance in his pronouncements—sounding an alarm without provoking a panic—the press labored under no such constraints. The back-to-back outrages, the rape-murder of a middle-aged invalid and vicious assault on a young mother-to-be, touched off an orgy of tabloid sensationalism.
Though Mrs. Murray had escaped from the strangler’s clutches with little more than a badly bruised neck, the papers reported that she was in critical condition, desperately fighting for her life as well as that of her unborn infant. Her assailant—the same “vile killer” who had murdered not only Mrs. Edmonds but five other Bay Area women—was a “human cobra,” a “moron with a strange twist in his warped brain,” who nevertheless possessed a “fiendish cunning and audacity” that had allowed him to “effect an easy escape through a cordon of police and a shotgun posse of highly aroused volunteer citizens.”
The San Francisco Chronicle even coined a colorful new nickname for the killer, one that echoed the most infamous pseudonym of modern times. It first appeared on November 21 in the account of Mrs. Murray’s ordeal. The article was published without a byline, but whoever wrote it clearly perceived something essential about the killer.
The headline of the article read: WOMAN TELLS OF HER FIGHT WITH “JACK THE STRANGLER.”
19
†
Charles Tennant
In none of these cases was murder necessary… . It is simply that the killer took delight in his work—he killed for the satisfaction it gave him.
The new nickname never caught on, possibly because it lacked the ominous ring of “the Dark Strangler.” But in certain ways, it was more apt. It suggested that the strangler belonged to the same deadly breed as the Whitechapel Monster, to that psychopathic species we now call serial killers. Moreover, it acknowledged the strangler’s extreme cunning, his ability (like Saucy Jack’s) to stay a step ahead of the police and make a mockery of their efforts to catch him.
Nevertheless, there were important differences between the two killers. While the Ripper’s name remains synonymous with serial sex-murder, his final tally of victims was relatively modest by modern-day standards: five women slain over several months. By November 21, 1926, the “Dark Strangler” had already exceeded that total, indeed, had nearly doubled it. Mrs. A. C. Murray, the pregnant young housewife from Burlingame, had barely escaped becoming his tenth murder victim. Mrs. Florence Fithian Monks of Seattle wouldn’t be as lucky.
According to acquaintances, it was vanity that got Mrs. Monks killed, her insistence on flaunting her fanciest jewelry even when performing the most routine of chores. To make a simple trip to the grocers, she would deck herself out like Queen Marie of Rumania. Her hands were adorned with no less than four diamond rings worth at least $5,000. In addition, she habitually wore a diamond bracelet and earrings, a triple-strand choker of genuine pearls, a cluster of jeweled lodge pins, and—on the bosom of her camisole—a large diamond sunburst valued at over $3,000.
Her friends, people like Mr. and Mrs. Harry G. Allen, repeatedly cautioned her about the dangers of such ostentation. The gems she insisted on displaying so freely were, they warned, “a temptation to almost any thief.” The Allens felt especially anxious because Mrs. Monks, a forty-eig
ht-year-old widow who suffered from a heart ailment, was often alone. Several times a week, she made the long drive from her country estate in Echo Lake Park to her home on Capitol Hill, staying by herself in the big, empty house. But Mrs. Monks scoffed at these warnings. “I’m not afraid,” she would say with a carefree little wave of one ring-laden hand. Unbeknownst to the Allens and her other good friends, Mrs. Monks had even more jewels on her person than the ones she kept on constant display. Strapped to her right leg, just below the knee, was a small sack of diamonds. Other valuable items of jewelry, including two diamond-studded brooches, were wrapped in a handkerchief and pinned to her underclothing.
The twice-widowed woman had inherited money from both her husbands. She had relocated to Seattle from New York City five years earlier with her second spouse, John J. Monks. Mr. Monks had died soon after the move, leaving his wife with substantial real estate holdings in Manhattan. Such was the size of her fortune that when, in late 1925, she suffered a $35,000 loss through a failed investment, she did not even blink, dismissing the sum as “a trifle.” Among her friends, she was rumored to be worth at least $500,000.
Having decided to make her country place her sole residence, Mrs. Monks had been trying to dispose of the Capitol Hill house, located at 723 12th Avenue North, since early fall. She had placed a “For Sale” sign in the parlor window and taken out weekly ads in the Seattle Times. The most recent had appeared on Monday, November 22. The ad indicated that Mrs. Monks would be at the house between 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday the twenty-fourth to show the property to interested parties.
She showed up a day early, driving down from Echo Lake Park first thing Tuesday morning. Not long after her arrival, she placed a telephone call to her friend, Mrs. Elsie Allen of 4230 11th Avenue, N.E. The two women discussed plans for several upcoming social functions, including a dinner party Mrs. Monks was organizing for members of her lodge, the Order of Amaranth (of which she was royal matron).
Bestial Page 15
