In May 1927 there were two other roomers staying in the house, a short-order cook named Michael Malloy and James Bottinger, a carpenter. That left two available rooms, both recently vacated by travelling salesmen. To advertise them, Mrs. Randolph had placed a “Rooms to Let” sign in a living-room window facing Plymouth Avenue. She had spent the better part of Thursday morning, May 26, putting the rooms in trim—dusting, mopping, making up the beds with freshly laundered sheets and clean white counterpanes. She had even hung new chintz curtains on the windows.
At around 11:00 A.M. on Friday, May 27 (just six days after “Lucky Lindy’s” monoplane touched down at Le Bourget Airport, transforming the lanky midwesterner into the idol of his age), a man calling himself Charles Harrison appeared at the front door, which was opened by Mrs. Randolph’s brother, Gideon Gillett. The man—about thirty-three years old by Gillett’s estimate, with a stocky build, dark complexion, and black hair combed straight back—explained that he was a housepainter from New York City who was thinking of moving to Buffalo. He was looking for temporary lodgings and had spotted the rental sign in the window as he was passing along Plymouth Avenue.
In spite of his baggy gray overcoat and some yellow paint stains on his fingernails, Harrison cut a perfectly presentable figure. Indeed, to Gillett’s eyes, the stranger—who was wearing a dark tan suit, a blue silk shirt with blue-striped tie, and tan oxfords—looked like a “flashy dresser.” True, there was something slightly disconcerting about his dark eyes, which seemed to glint in a peculiar way. But on the whole, he appeared thoroughly respectable.
When Gillett told him the cost of the room, five dollars a week, Harrison made a disappointed noise and replied that the rent was too high for him. Thanking Gillett for his time, he was on the verge of leaving when Jennie Randolph came to the door to see who the caller was.
After introducing Harrison to his sister, Gillett explained that the painter had decided to look elsewhere. Harrison, however, suddenly seemed to reconsider. “If it’s all right with you, I think I’ll have a look at your rooms after all,” he said, showing his square, white teeth as Mrs. Randolph invited him inside.
Harrison allowed the landlady to show him both bedrooms. The one on the ground floor, adjacent to the kitchen, did not suit him at all. He liked the upstairs room better, though it was more cramped than the first and located at the far end of a dimly lit corridor. When Harrison casually asked about the other tenants, Mrs. Randolph told him a bit about Fred Merritt, Michael Malloy, and James Bottinger.
Shortly afterwards, Harrison asked Mrs. Randolph if she would consider reducing the rent by one dollar. When she remained firm, he thanked her and departed.
At around six that evening, however, he reappeared with a small travelling bag in hand and announced that he had changed his mind. He gave Mrs. Randolph a five-dollar bill and settled into the second-floor room.
Later police theorized that “Harrison” had spent that afternoon searching for an easier setup, a rooming house with no male boarders and a completely unprotected landlady. Failing to find such a place, he had returned to Jennie Randolph’s home, apparently assuming that, at some point, he would meet with an opportunity to get the fifty-three-year-old widow alone.
That opportunity came in the early morning hours of Monday, May 30.
He had slept late on Sunday, emerging from his room just before noon. He spent the rest of the day hanging about the house, making small talk with Merritt and Gillett and, at one point, helping the latter repair a leaky bathroom faucet.
When suppertime rolled around, Harrison accompanied Fred Merritt to a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, where the two men chatted amiably over a dinner of corned beef hash and beans. Merritt was slightly taken aback by Harrison’s eating habits, particularly the ferocious way he shovelled food into his mouth. Still, the housepainter seemed like a decent enough fellow, who could converse fluently on a wide range of topics, from astrology to Spiritualism.
Returning to the house around 6:00 P.M., the two men found Jennie Randolph seated in the living room with Gillett, discussing church-related matters. While Merritt repaired to his room to get ready for work, Harrison sat down with the landlady and her brother. Soon, he was holding forth on religious topics, so impressing Mrs. Randolph with his knowledge of Scripture that she invited him to accompany her to services that night. Harrison, however, demurred.
At around eight, the landlady departed for church, while her brother and the new lodger continued their conversation in the living room. They were still talking when she returned an hour later. After fixing herself a cup of tea, she rejoined the two men in the living room. By then, Fred Merritt had already left for work.
At approximately ten o’clock, Gillett, stifling a yawn, excused himself and headed upstairs to bed. According to his later testimony, he awoke around midnight and got up to use the bathroom. As he shuffled along the hallway, he could hear the muffled voices of his sister and Harrison, who were still seated downstairs, engaged in an animated conversation.
Returning to his bed, the sixty-year-old Gillett slept until approximately 3:00 A.M. Slipping on his bathrobe, he tiptoed downstairs, fetched the empty milk bottles from the kitchen, and set them out on the front porch. Instead of returning to his room, he stretched out on the living-room couch and was soon asleep again.
He was still sleeping when Fred Merritt returned from his night watchman’s job at around 7:30 A.M. Normally, Mrs. Randolph was in the kitchen at that hour, preparing her breakfast before going off to her job at the YMCA. The young man was a bit surprised to find the kitchen empty but assumed that the landlady had stayed up late talking to Harrison and was allowing herself a few extra minutes of sleep.
Leaving the house again, Merritt strolled to a nearby grocery store, where he purchased three hard rolls for his own breakfast, along with the morning paper.
When he returned about fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Randolph was still nowhere to be seen. He immediately roused Gillett. With Merritt at his side, Gillett made for the kitchen, where he instantly spotted something that had escaped the younger man’s attention: ugly reddish-brown stains on the kitchen floor.
Rushing to Mrs. Randolph’s ground-floor room, the two men were alarmed to discover that her bed was still neatly made. Instantly, they hurried to the staircase where Gillett saw something that made his heart turn to ice: a trail of the same bloody marks leading upstairs.
The bloodstains ended at the locked door of the new lodger’s bedroom. Merritt, a muscular youth, battered the door open with his shoulder. Bursting into the room, the two men were greeted by a horrifying sight—a pair of woman’s feet protruding from under the bed. With a yell that brought the other tenants running, Merritt and Gillett leapt to the bed and heaved it off of Jennie Randolph’s savaged body.
She had been the victim of a bestial assault. Her bulging eyes were blackened, her nose was battered flat, her face was scarred with scratch marks. She had been pounded on the side of the head with a blunt object and garrotted with a kitchen towel, tied so tightly around her neck that it seemed embedded in the flesh. She was naked below the waist, her skirt and undergarments having been violently ripped from her lower body. Later the coroner would determine that (as the Buffalo Evening News put it) the fifty-three-year-old had been “maltreated after death.” As for her killer, the disarming fiend who called himself Charles Harrison, there was no trace of him to be found.
* * *
From the moment he learned the details of the case, Buffalo Police Chief James W. Higgins knew who the killer was. “Harrison” was none other than the notorious West Coast strangler, who had gone by the name of “Adrian Harris” in Portland. Higgins had only recently seen a flier about the strangler, circulated by the Philadelphia police.
At a news conference on Monday afternoon, the chief shared his belief with the press, announcing that Jennie Randolph had almost certainly been slain by the “long-sought Pacific Coast Bluebeard—perhaps the most brutal killer, and c
ertainly one of the most cunning, in the history of this country.”
So apprehensive was Higgins that the strangler would shortly strike again that he wired an alert to police departments in every city within a 500-mile radius of Buffalo. Meanwhile, the entire detective squad was assigned to the manhunt.
Their only significant lead came from a man named Wilkinson, who owned a pawnshop on Seneca Street. According to Wilkinson, who contacted the police on Tuesday, a stranger had come by his pawnshop the previous morning, looking to sell a travelling bag full of clothes. After a bit of haggling, the man had accepted the proffered amount: four dollars. Wilkinson, who was struck by the fellow’s “peculiar eyes,” took particular note of his appearance, which (he was now convinced) corresponded in every respect to the published descriptions of Mrs. Randolph’s killer.
When Detectives Frank Brinkworth and John Steibeck showed up at the pawnshop to examine the items, they saw at once that Wilkinson was right. The clothing, which included a pair of painter’s overalls, precisely matched the ones that “Charles Harrison” had with him during his stay at Mrs. Randolph’s rooming house.
To Detective Chief Austin J. Roche, the fact that the killer had settled for such a meager sum suggested that he was desperately low on funds and needed whatever cash he could get hold of to flee the city. It was also apparent that he was no longer travelling in his Ford coupe. Through the window of his pawnshop, Wilkinson had seen him out on Seneca Street attempting to hitch a ride with a passing motorist.
On the following day, Jennie Randolph was buried alongside her husband and son in Elmlawn Cemetery. Afterwards, dozens of visitors came by the house to offer condolences to her brother.
Among the callers was a reporter from the Buffalo Evening News, who managed to wangle an interview with the grieving man. Gillett, a vigorous sixty-year-old, seemed to have aged twenty years overnight. His gray head bent low, his faded blue eyes welling with tears, his voice breaking with sobs, he recounted the story of his sister’s sad life, explaining how she had “moved into the house eighteen years earlier, after the death of her husband. Six years later, Orville, for whom she had dreamed great ambitions, died. Then she was alone. She threw herself into church work and tried to make a home for the roomers and boarders she took in.”
He explained how, after arming herself “with broom, mop, and duster,” she had spent the previous Friday morning preparing the upstairs bedroom. The reporter asked if he could see the room. Gillett seemed reluctant at first but finally agreed. Climbing the stairs as stiffly as an arthritic, he made his way down the dimly lit corridor. Then, after taking a moment to brace himself, he threw open the door.
Peering into the “cheery, homey-looking room,” the reporter took note of its simple furnishings—an oak dresser topped with a lacy, white doily, a green-seated rocker, a single bed with a simple wooden headboard.
Suddenly, Gillett let out a sob and pointed a quivering finger to the floor at the foot of the bed. “There!” he cried. “There I found the body of my sister. And there on the woodwork is her blood!”
The reporter glanced down at the dull, brownish stains in the center of the room. For all their drabness, they seemed “startlingly bright against the floorboards that Jennie Randolph had scrubbed clean on Friday, wholly unaware, of course, that she was making the room ready to receive her own corpse.”
26
†
Alexander B. Beard, “The Murder at Fall River”
The crimes we read of every day
Cause many hearts to shiver
But few surpass in magnitude
The murder at Fall River.
On the very day of Jennie Randolph’s funeral—Wednesday, June 1, 1927—Miss Lizzie Borden (or “Lizbeth” as she preferred to be called later in life) died at “Maplecroft,” her stately home in a fashionable district of Fall River, Massachusetts. For the previous thirty-odd years, she had led a semireclusive life, shunned by most of the townspeople, who believed that she had gotten away with murder.
During the decades that followed her acquittal, the wealthy spinster remained an object of morbid curiosity, drawing stares whenever she rode through the streets in her handsome horse-drawn carriage (and later in a chauffeured limousine). A fan of the theater, she made occasional jaunts to Boston, Providence, and Washington, D.C. When she died at the age of sixty-seven, she left a sizable estate. Among her bequests was a $30,000 gift to her favorite charity, the Animal Rescue League of Fall River.
The news of her death came as a surprise to most of her countrymen. Lizzie Borden—who “took an axe and gave her father forty whacks”—had passed into legend so many years earlier that it was hard to think of her as a flesh-and-blood person who had survived into the era of flappers and speakeasies, movies and motor cars.
Of course, even the death of the celebrated parricide was eclipsed by the nation’s frenzy over Charles A. Lindbergh, who was being urged to return with all possible speed to his native land, where he would be greeted with something like mass hysteria. One New York newspaper described his flight as “the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race,” while the Tucson Dispatch declared that, “One must go back to the fictive times of the gods who dwelt on Mount Olympus for a feat that will parallel that of Captain Lindbergh.”
George M. Cohan, the Yankee Doodle Dandy himself, composed a pop paean to the lanky, young idol—“When Lindy Comes Home”“that became an immediate hit. Streets, trains, and even whole towns were rechristened with his name. A new dance, the “Lindy Hop,” was invented in his honor. The ticker-tape parade he received in Manhattan on June 13 would generate nearly 2,000 tons of confetti, more than ten times the amount that showered onto the streets when the Armistice was announced in 1918.
With the whole country caught up in the Lindbergh craze, the double slaving of two middle-aged women on June 1 received relatively little attention, even in Detroit, where the killings took place. To a certain extent, the indifference stemmed from the perceived character of one of the victims, a woman of supposedly questionable morals who—as the newspapers initially implied—had brought the tragedy on herself.
Her name was Mrs. Noresh Chandra Atorthy, though she’d been using her maiden name, Maureen Oswald, ever since her divorce. Her ex-husband, described in the papers as “a Hindu physician,” had since moved to London to do postgraduate work in medicine.
According to her divorce papers, Dr. Atorthy had severely mistreated his wife—beating her routinely, refusing her money for food, and subjecting her to various forms of public humiliation. “After our marriage,” she had deposed, “I found that Dr. Atorthy had married me for spite. He had been going with another girl for four years and when she jilted him, he married me. I now realize that he never loved me.
“Dr. Atorthy forced me to carry fifty-pound blocks of ice up two flights of stairs and made me split big chunks of coal for the furnace. He seemed to despise me and made his patients think I was the scrub woman.”
For his part, Dr. Atorthy had charged that his wife was both an alcoholic and a drug addict who had stolen narcotics from his office. Later investigation into the life of Mrs. Atorthy, née Oswald, revealed that, while serving with the Women’s Auxiliary Army during the Great War, she had been wounded at Vimy Ridge and had indeed become addicted to morphine.
Following the breakup of her marriage in February 1927, she had taken a room at 640 Philadelphia Avenue West, a boardinghouse owned by an absentee landlord named Leonard Sink and managed by a fifty-three-year-old widow, Mrs. Fannie C. May. On the first day of June, Sink came by to collect the rent, but no one appeared to be home. He tried again on the following afternoon. This time, he rang the bell and knocked on the door for nearly five minutes before giving up. When he failed to get a response for the third consecutive day, he became alarmed, particularly since there was a growing pile of mail and newspapers on the front porch.
Proceeding to the Bethune police station, Sink identified himself as the owne
r of the house and told the desk sergeant that he “believed the occupants were in some sort of difficulty.” Two officers, Patrolmen Roy Tatton and Ralph Morton, accompanied him back to the house. After trying the doorbell with no success, the three men entered with Sink’s passkey.
They found Mrs. May first. She was lying facedown on the tiled floor of the upstairs bedroom, her white cotton housedress bunched above her hips, an electric cord knotted around her neck.
Mrs. Atorthy’s corpse was stretched out on the floor of the adjacent bedroom. She had been garrotted with a length of black ribbon. The front of her blouse had been ripped open, and her brown cotton skirt pulled up to her waist. Her topcoat and hat were lying on the floor. From the way the two victims were dressed—the landlady in houseclothes, her tenant in street attire—the officers surmised that the killer had found Mrs. May alone, attacked her, then awaited the return of Mrs. Atorthy. As the Detroit News reported, “A ‘Rooms for Rent’ sign had been placed in the front door of the house, and it would have been easy for a stranger to have gained entrance without exciting Mrs. May’s suspicion.”
The bedrooms had been ransacked, the contents of the bureau drawers spilled onto the floors. After learning about Mrs. Atorthy’s background, the police surmised that she had been killed by one of her unsavory acquaintances, a “dope fiend” who had come to the house to steal her supply of drugs and had slain both women to prevent them from identifying him.
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