Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  Less than forty-five minutes after the paper hit the stands, Detective Sergeant W. B. Kent received a call from Mrs. Harry G. Allen, a close friend of the victim. “Those look like Florence’s jewels,” Mrs. Allen declared. She was brought down to headquarters by squad car, where—after making a firsthand examination of the gems—she tearfully confirmed that they had belonged to her murdered friend. Later in the day, several more of Mrs. Monks’ intimates—including a neighbor, Miss Mattie Nelson, and Charles McMinimee, executor of the slain widow’s estate—positively identified the jewels.

  Meanwhile, down in Portland, investigators were pursuing another lead involving Mrs. Monks’ stolen property. Shortly after the publication of Wednesday’s Morning Oregonian, which ran a page-one story on the recovered jewels, no fewer than four pawnshop owners had contacted the police with precisely the same story. On the previous afternoon, a dark-complexioned young man had appeared in each of their stores, attempting to sell a white-gold woman’s lodge pin—an item which (as the brokers now realized) had been part of the loot taken from the murdered widow. None of the pawnbrokers had purchased the pin, since the young man, though apparently eager to unload it, had sniffed at their offers.

  A special police detail, under the supervision of Inspectors Howell and Abbott, was immediately assigned to check out every hockshop and secondhand store in Seattle in the hope of locating the pin and tracking its seller. But this effort proved unavailing. The police did manage to haul in over a dozen suspects, including a forty-four-year-old Serbian who bore a striking resemblance to the published descriptions of the strangler. But all these men were promptly released when their fingerprints failed to match the ones retrieved from the iron headboard in the room where Blanche Myers had been killed.

  On Thursday afternoon, the coroner’s inquest into the death of Mrs. Myers took place in Portland. Three witnesses testified at this pro forma affair—Dr. Robert Benson, the coroner’s physician who conducted the autopsy; the victim’s younger son, Lawrence, who had reported her disappearance to the police; and Alexander Muir, the owner of the boardinghouse, who had been sharing lunch with the landlady when her killer appeared at the front door. It took the jury only a few minutes to reach its foregone conclusion: “That Mrs. Blanche Myers met death by strangulation at the hands of a party or parties unknown.”

  At virtually the same time in Seattle, the funeral of Florence Monks was underway in the Corinthian room of the Masonic Temple, located at Harvard Avenue and Pine Street. In accordance with Mrs. Monks’ will, the services were conducted under the auspices of Seattle Chapter No. 95, Order of the Eastern Star, the Reverend Maurice J. Bywater officiating. The temple was packed with more than 400 mourners, including the slain woman’s sister, Vivian Drummond of Flushing, New York, who had arrived the previous afternoon with her husband, Charles. Following Mrs. Monks’ interment at Lakeview Cemetery—where she was laid to rest in a plot adjoining that of her late husband, John—Charles Drummond spoke to reporters, declaring that it was his firm intention to “devote his energies to unraveling the mystery veiling the brutal murder of his wife’s sister.”

  Any doubts that Florence Monks and Blanche Myers had been strangled by the same fiendish killer were resolved on Saturday afternoon, when Detective Sergeant W. J. Sampson of Seattle’s Police Identification Bureau confirmed that fingerprints lifted from a black pocketbook in Mrs. Monks’ bedroom precisely matched the ones discovered on the iron headboard in Mrs. Myers’ rooming house. Over the next few days, police up and down the Pacific Coast made what the papers described as a “frantic effort” to locate the killer. But the manhunt led nowhere. The strangler’s whereabouts remained completely unknown, though Portland investigators did manage to turn up another eyewitness who had come into direct contact with the killer.

  This was a grocer named Russell Gordon, who owned a little store on Third Street, the very one where “Adrian Harris” had purchased fourteen dollars’ worth of dinner provisions on the day before Thanksgiving. According to Gordon, “Harris” was such a pleasant, soft-spoken, and polite individual that it was almost impossible to believe he could be the notorious strangler. “Why, I never spoke to a nicer mannered fellow,” Gordon told the officers who interviewed him.

  Gordon’s testimony only confirmed what the police already knew from Edna Gaylord, Sophie Yates, and others (like Mrs. H. C. Murray) who had spent time in the strangler’s company and lived to tell about it. “When not in the midst of his heinous crimes,” as the Seattle Daily Times reported, “the Dark Strangler has an engaging personality, quiet habits, and pleasing manners.”

  In attempting to account for such a singular being, a monstrous killer whose daily demeanor gave “no intimation that he possessed any talent for crime,” the authorities were clearly at a loss. “The murderer isn’t a maniac in the sense that he is mentally deranged,” Chief of Detectives Charles Tennant of Seattle told a gathering of reporters on Saturday, December 4. “But there must be a screw loose somewhere.”

  The best explanation that authorities could come up with was that the strangler “possessed a dual personality,” making him a “real-life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In 1926, a criminal who could seem perfectly ordinary one moment and turn into a maddened sex killer the next was clearly so extraordinary that he seemed like a creature out of fantasy. The time had not yet arrived when psychopathic lust murderers, capable of concealing their malevolence behind a mask of bland normality, would be a grimly familiar feature of American society.

  In the week following Blanche Myers’ murder, the main detective room on the third floor of Portland’s central police station was (as the Oregonian reported) “a veritable ‘mad house,’ with clerks and operators taking hundreds of telephone calls from citizens who had reports to make on suspicious characters, and a score or more of detectives working frantically, taking reports from citizens who visited the office.” Investigators dutifully followed through on all of these leads, even the most far-fetched. But none of them panned out.

  On Monday, December 6, newspapers reported the arrest of a drifter named Morris Yoffee, who had arrived in Eugene, Oregon, a few days earlier. Engaging a room in a local boardinghouse, he had promptly aroused the suspicions of the proprietress, who, like virtually every other landlady in the Pacific Northwest, lived in constant vigilance of the “Dark Strangler.”

  There was something furtive about Yoffee’s behavior. Since his arrival, he had remained sequestered inside his room, emerging only at mealtimes. He had also betrayed a disquieting interest in the murder of Florence Fithian Monks, sending out each afternoon for the Seattle Daily Times, so that he could follow the latest developments in the investigation. At the table, he conversed about the case with an enthusiasm that struck the landlady as distinctly unhealthy.

  On the morning of December 6, she put in a telephone call to police headquarters. That afternoon, Chief Jenkins himself, disguised in plain clothes and posing as a prospective tenant, showed up at the rooming house to check out the suspect. Convinced that Yoffee bore a passable resemblance to the descriptions of “Adrian Harris,” Jenkins revealed his identity and took the startled man into custody. “Am I wanted in Seattle?” Yoffee asked as he was led off to jail.

  Within twelve hours, however, following a telephone conversation between Chief Jenkins and Detective Captain William Justus of Seattle, Yoffee was released. According to Justus, the suspect’s appearance did not, in fact, jibe with the strangler’s. “The man arrested at Eugene has light, watery eyes and is slender,” Justus explained to reporters on Tuesday morning. “The man we think killed Mrs. Monks had dark, penetrating eyes and was of a husky build.”

  Two days later, papers trumpeted the arrest of another suspect, a thirty-one-year-old Nebraskan named James Ford, who strolled into Seattle police headquarters early Thursday morning and announced that he was the “beast man” who had slain Mrs. Monks. As the police began questioning Ford, however, it quickly became clear that he was ignorant of the most basic f
acts about the case. Ford—who eventually admitted that his imagination had been overly stimulated by a combination of bootleg liquor and the gruesome crime stories he had been reading in Thrilling Detective magazine—was deemed “mentally unbalanced” and held for a sanity hearing.

  The media attention given to such a flagrant crank as Ford was a sign of how little of real substance there was to report about the case. As the Myers investigation entered its second week, the killer’s trail had grown completely cold. Though police were now armed with a detailed description of the “beast man’s” appearance, mannerisms, and m.o., he continued to elude them.

  Speaking to reporters on Friday morning, December 11, Chief of Detectives Charles Tennant of Portland couldn’t conceal his frustration. “It’s uncanny the way this killer operates,” Tennant declared.

  Indeed, Tennant was so discouraged over the state of the investigation that he made what amounted to a complete admission of defeat. In a front-page story headlined POLICE FEAR “DARK KILLER” WILL RETURN, an anonymous reporter for the Seattle Daily Times who had attended Tennant’s Friday-morning press conference wrote: “So baffling have been the murders, so cunningly has their perpetrator covered up his tracks that Tennant confessed yesterday that his greatest concern was that another woman would be found mysteriously slain here.”

  Indeed, it was only a matter of time, Tennant was convinced, before the “Dark Strangler” reappeared in Portland or one of the other Pacific Coast cities and claimed “victim number twelve.”

  22

  †

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.

  But Detective Chief Tennant was wrong. The killer would never return to Portland or to any of his previous hunting grounds. By now the Pacific Coast really had gotten too hot for him.

  By the time of Tennant’s news conference, the killer had already embarked on an odyssey that would eventually take him to the opposite end of the continent and halfway back again. Keeping on the move, however, was not a problem for the homicidal maniac now variously known as the “Dark Strangler,” the “Phantom Killer,” and the “Beast Man.” Ever since adolescence—when he would disappear from the home of his long-suffering family for weeks at a time—he had been possessed of a powerful wanderlust.

  Three weeks after Blanche Myers’ murder, he would show up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, at the precise midpoint of the country. For the next six months, he would trace a roughly trapezoidal course, heading southward to Kansas City, Missouri, then straight across to Philadelphia, up into Buffalo, and westward again to Detroit and Chicago. And everywhere he went, women died.

  On the day before Christmas, 1926, Mrs. John Brerard of Council Bluffs became the strangler’s twelfth victim. The forty-one-year-old woman lived with her husband and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Corene, in a simple two-story house at 351 Willow Avenue, within earshot of the city’s business district. The house had been built for them four years earlier when the Brerards had moved to Council Bluffs from their previous home in Emerson, Iowa.

  To supplement Mr. Brerard’s modest earnings as a passenger agent for the Burlington Railroad, the couple rented out the two spare bedrooms on the second floor. The larger of these had originally been occupied by their older daughter, Evelyn, a nurse at the Methodist Hospital in Omaha, who had recently gotten married and moved into a home of her own. For the past few months, Evelyn’s former bedroom had been rented out to a thirty-four-year-old fireman for the Burlington Railroad named Robert Moore, an old family friend.

  The other, smaller room had been vacant for nearly a year. As in most of the previous murder cases, there was a hand-lettered “Room to Rent” sign prominently displayed in a front window of the Brerard home.

  At approximately 3:15 P.M. on December 24, Moore headed downstairs on his way to work. As he passed by the living room, he saw Mrs. Brerard chatting with someone he had never laid eyes on before, a burly, dark-complexioned man dressed in somewhat shabby clothing.

  Beckoning to Moore, the landlady introduced him to the stranger, whose name, she said, was “Mr. Williams.” Moore, who was late for work, barely took note of the other man. As he later explained to police, he assumed that the fellow “was probably some worker in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, of which Mrs. Brerard was an active member.” Giving the stranger’s hand a quick shake, Moore said that it had been nice to meet him, then hurried from the house—never to see Mrs. Brerard alive again.

  The discovery of her body followed what was by now a dismayingly familiar pattern. At around four in the afternoon, the Brerards’ younger daughter, Corene, returned from her job as a salesgirl in a local millinery shop and found the house empty. Though her mother was normally home at that hour, engaged in dinner preparations, Corene was not concerned. There was a big family gathering planned for the following day in celebration of both Christmas and Mrs. Brerard’s birthday, which fell on December 28. Corene assumed that her mother must have gone out to do some last-minute shopping.

  When Mr. Brerard returned from work shortly after five, father and daughter headed out on an eleventh-hour shopping expedition of their own. It wasn’t until they returned to the house an hour or so later, expecting to find Mrs. Brerard in the kitchen, that they began to get worried. She was still nowhere in sight.

  While John Brerard descended to the basement, Corene headed upstairs to check the vacant rooms. Moments later, she was rushing back down the staircase in response to a sound she had never heard before in her life—her father’s terrified shrieks, so loud and piercing that they carried throughout the entire house.

  She had just reached the ground floor when her father came stumbling up the stairs from the basement, half-delirious with fear. “It’s Mother!” he cried. “Go for help!”

  There was no telephone in the Brerard house. Dashing to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Henry Frandsen of 207 Fourth Street, Corene called the police. Within minutes, Sheriff P. A. Lainson and two of his deputies were at the crime scene, where they found John Brerard almost cataleptic with shock.

  He was staring fixedly at the furnace. Peering behind it, Lainson saw Mrs. Brerard’s lifeless body wedged between the back of the furnace and the basement wall. She had been strangled with a man’s cotton shirt, which had apparently been plucked from a clothesline strung across the ceiling beams.

  Though Mrs. Brerard was a frail, small-boned woman, she had clearly put up a terrific struggle. Her face and arms were badly bruised, the floor was stained with blood, there were clumps of her hair stuck to the furnace door. Her husband’s neatly organized workbench had been overturned, and his tools lay scattered across the basement floor.

  In spite of this evidence, one local official, County Attorney Frank Northrop, made an astonishing pronouncement. Shortly after the discovery of Mrs. Brerard’s body, Northrop met with reporters and revealed that the victim had recently been discharged from St. Bernard’s mental hospital, where she had been treated for a “nervous disorder.” Given her fragile emotional state, Northrop declared, it was possible “that the shirt may have been knotted about her throat in a suicide attempt.”

  But Northrop (whose deductive skills clearly rivalled those of James M. Tackaberry, the Portland detective who hypothesized that Mrs. Beata Withers had taken her own life by stuffing herself inside an attic trunk) was alone in this opinion. Everyone else, from Sheriff P. A. Lainson to the victim’s overwrought husband, believed that she had been slam by the mysterious “Mr. Williams,” possibly in the course of a thwarted rape.

  “It seems very plain to me,” Lainson told newsmen shortly after examining the murder scene, “that her attacker intended to commit a criminal assault and, failing in his effort, killed her for fear she would report the attack to us.”

  The question, of course, was the true identity of “Williams.” Some investigators believed that he was himself a former inmate of St. Bernard’s who had developed a deadly obsession with Mrs. Brerard. But a search of the hospi
tal’s records turned up no one matching the suspect’s description.

  Sheriff Lainson—who had been following the recent rash of killings on the West Coast—offered another, much more chilling theory, which was reported by the local paper, the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, on Christmas morning, the day after Mrs. Brerard’s murder. Prominently featured on page one was a black-bordered box headlined WARNING! The text read as follows:

  Saying it was possible that Mrs. John Brerard was killed by a “strangler” such as has killed women in California, Oregon, and Washington during the past few months, Sheriff P. A. Lainson this afternoon asked The Nonpareil to warn housewives of this city against admitting to their homes a man of the description of the “Mr. Williams” known to have called at the Brerard home shortly before Mrs. Brerard was found dead. The description is:

  Height—-Five feet, eight inches.

  Weight—180 pounds.

  Complexion—Dark.

  Eyes—Dark, piercing.

  Clothing—Pearl-colored hat, mouse-colored coat, over-shoes.

  Sheriff Lainson’s theory was bolstered that very day when another witness came forward. After seeing Lainson’s warning in Saturday’s Nonpareil, a Council Bluffs matron, Mrs. O. H. Brown, telephoned his office with a chilling tale.

  Just thirty minutes before the Brerard slaying, according to Mrs. Brown, a squat, swarthy man had appeared on the doorstep of her house at 232 Tenth Avenue, which had a wooden “For Sale” sign planted on the front lawn. Introducing himself as “Mr. Williams,” the man—who was perfectly polite and well-spoken, if somewhat shabbily dressed—explained that he was a railroad switchman, originally from Milwaukee and currently living in Omaha. He was about to be transferred to Iowa and was thinking of buying a house in Council Bluffs to be “nearer to his work.”

  Mrs. Brown, whose husband was at work in his bakery a few blocks away, invited him inside. After examining every room in the house, “Williams” asked to see the basement furnace. By then, however, Mrs. Brown had grown wary of the dark-complexioned stranger. “I was afraid of him,” she would later explain to a reporter for the Nonpareil. “His eyes were so black and piercing, with an odd glint in them, that I became afraid and hurried him to the door, asking him to call the store and talk to my husband.”