Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  “Come,” said Waldman.

  Ushering the stranger outside, the obliging clothier walked him across Main Street to a place called Central Billiards. Occupying one end of the cavernous pool hall was a row of barber chairs. Waldman introduced the stranger to one of the barbers, a man named Nick Tabor.

  “Fix this fellow up good, Nick,” said Waldman. Then, while the stranger settled into the chair and Tabor whetted his blade on the leather strop, Waldman returned to his store, taking note of the time when he got back—precisely 2:05 P.M.

  Though Tabor was not a particularly voluble man, he was curious about his customer, never having set eyes on him before. For his part, the stranger seemed happy to talk. In fact, he kept up a steady stream of chatter, almost as if he were “hopped up” on something (as Tabor later reported).

  He told Tabor that he was from the States, “born and bred in Frisco,” though he’d spent time “all over” the country. He had recently made a trip to several cities in the East—Philadelphia, Buffalo, Washington, B.C. He worked as a commercial traveller, selling “small articles.”

  When Tabor asked what kind of car he drove, the man said a Studebaker. “I need to travel fast,” he explained with a grin.

  Daubing lather onto the man’s swarthy face, Tabor asked how he came to be in Winnipeg.

  He was passing through North Dakota, the stranger replied, and, never having been in Canada before, decided to take a look. “Not much to see, though,” he added.

  Tabor, a lifelong Winnipegger, bridled at the aspersion.

  “There’s as much to see here as in the States,” he answered.

  The dark-skinned man smirked. “Maybe.”

  He remained in the barber chair for nearly an hour, getting the full treatment—shave, haircut, hot towel, facial massage. At one point, while combing back the stranger’s black, receding hair, Tabor noticed that there was blood on his forehead, right by the hairline. There seemed to be some open sores on the man’s scalp, or possibly scratches. Tabor wasn’t sure. But one thing was obvious. The blood was still fresh.

  Rising from the chair at around 3:00 P.M., the stranger settled with Tabor, tipping the barber four bits. Then he went into the café next door for a bite.

  Later that day, as he was passing the display window of a haberdashery store called Chevrier’s, his eye was caught by a champagne-colored fedora with a gaudy, detachable band. Ducking into the store, he asked the price.

  “Four-fifty,” said the salesman, Thomas Carten.

  He decided to splurge. Removing the cap he had just purchased at Waldman’s, he had Carten bag it up in a brown paper sack and wore his flashy new hat out of the store.

  Like most of what he had told Nick Tabor, the bit about the Studebaker was a lie. At around six that evening, he boarded a trolley headed west. On the ride, he struck up a conversation with a man named John Hofer, introducing himself as “Walter Woods.” Their talk took a strange turn when he asked if Hofer was a minister.

  Hofer was taken aback. “No. Why?”

  “You’ve got a clean face.”

  Hofer didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you apostolic?” asked the stranger.

  Again, Hofer was at a loss, since he didn’t know the meaning of the word. Before he could think of a reply, the man said, “You look like a religious person.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I am the champion of the world at telling faces,” said the man, letting out a self-satisfied chortle.

  Sometime later, he confessed that he occasionally overindulged in drink.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” said Hofer.

  “I know,” he sighed. Then, shaking his head sadly, he added, “Satan has too much power over educated men like me.”

  Before they parted at Headingly, “Woods” handed Hofer the brown paper bag he was carrying. “You can have this if you want it.”

  “What is it?” asked Hofer.

  “Look and see.”

  Hofer opened the bag, peered inside, then reached in and extracted the cream-colored cap.

  “It’s yours if you want it,” the other man said again.

  “Well, sure, if you don’t have any use for it,” said Hofer.

  They parted at Headingly, where “Woods” stopped off at a soda fountain and drank a Coca-Cola. Outside again, he flagged down a car driven by a man named Hugh Elder, who offered him a lift to Portage La Prairie. Along the way, they spoke about religion.

  At approximately 6:25 P.M., around the time that “Walter Woods” was boarding the Portage Avenue trolley, William Patterson returned to his house at 100 Riverton Street in Elmwood.

  The house was empty. He found his sons, James and Thomas, ages three and five, at the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Evelyn Stanger, whose own little boys were Jim and Tommy’s playmates. Mrs. Stanger had no idea where Patterson’s wife was. She hadn’t seen Emily since early that morning, when the two women chatted briefly while walking their five-year-olds to school.

  Patterson was mildly surprised but not concerned. He assumed his wife had paid a visit to a friend and gotten held up for some reason. Thanking Mrs. Stanger, he took his sons back home, fed them supper, and put them to bed.

  By 10:30 that night, however, Patterson was growing frantic. His wife had never shown up. Returning to the Stangers’ house, he used their telephone to check with Emily’s friends. But no one had seen or spoken to her all day.

  When he got back to his own house shortly after eleven, he felt almost sick with anxiety. Pacing the darkened hallways, he glanced into the bedroom of his sleeping boys and, by the glow of the nightlight, noticed something that had escaped his attention earlier, when he’d put his sons to bed.

  In one corner of the room stood a little locked suitcase, where Patterson stashed his nest egg—sixty dollars in new ten-dollar bills. Now, he could see that the lock had been tampered with—the latch was twisted and sprung, as though it had been pried open. Hurrying across the room, he crouched by the case and lifted the lid.

  His money was gone. In its place was a claw hammer.

  Patterson felt dizzy with confusion. A deeply religious man, he made his way to the bed of his younger son, James, and knelt on the carpeted floor. Palms pressed together, elbows propped on the mattress, he implored God for guidance, praying (as he later testified) that the Lord “would direct him to where his wife was.”

  As he started to rise, one of his knees caught the low-hanging coverlet and thrust it aside, exposing the bottom of the bed. There was something poking out from under the bed. It looked like the sleeve of his wife’s woolen sweater, the one she liked to wear around the house.

  Patterson reached beneath the bed. What he felt made his throat clench with fear. Fleeing to the Stangers’ house, he managed to put in a panicked call to the police before collapsing in a faint.

  29

  †

  Mrs. Catherine Hill

  I drew up the blinds when I felt the smell in the room.

  Like countless Winnipeggers, Catherine Hill reacted with both wonder and dread to the lead story in Saturday’s Free Press. Spread across four front-page columns, it told how twenty-seven-year-old William Patterson, seconds after entreating the Lord “to direct him to his missing wife,” had discovered her strangled and violated corpse beneath the bed of their slumbering child. The scene, evoked in all its horror and pathos, sent a shudder through Mrs. Hill. Clearly, when it came to grotesque tragedy, there was nothing in gothic fiction that could match the monstrosities of real life.

  The article went on to describe the progress of the police investigation. Officers had arrived at 100 Riverton Street within minutes of receiving Patterson’s frantic call. Inside, they found several of his stunned neighbors gathered around the rumpled bed, which someone had shoved about two feet away from the wall. Patterson himself, almost stupefied with grief, was being comforted in an adjoining room by his neighbor, Mrs. Stanger, while another Samaritan attended to his two sobbing children.


  Clearing everyone from the crime scene, the three constables—Mann, Wood, and Gibson—carefully dismantled the single bed, completely exposing Emily Patterson’s corpse. The twenty-three-year-old woman lay sprawled on her back, the lower half of her body twisted sideways. She was still fully clad, though her skirt had been yanked above her hips and her stockings rolled below her knees. Her face was smeared with blood from her battered nose and mouth, and there was an ugly bruise on her forehead.

  Coroner Herman Cameron, who arrived shortly after the three constables, determined that Mrs. Patterson had been struck on the head with a blunt instrument—possibly the hammer that her husband had found inside his suitcase—then asphyxiated by smothering and strangulation. She also had been raped, apparently after death. Cameron found a glaze of dried seminal fluid on the front of her right thigh.

  While the coroner oversaw the removal of Mrs. Patterson’s corpse to Kerr’s undertaking parlor (where a complete postmortem would be performed by Dr. W. P. McCowan), two detectives, Charles McIver and Harold Fox, conducted a thorough search of the house. It wasn’t long before they made several important discoveries. A threadbare suit belonging to the overwrought husband turned out to be missing from his bedroom. It had evidently been stolen by the killer, whose own discarded clothes—a shabby blue jacket and brown cottonade trousers—were found heaped in a corner of the room. Inside the pocket of the trousers the detectives discovered some crumpled newspaper classifieds torn from the “Rooms to Let” section of the Winnipeg Tribune.

  From this telltale clue, and the conspicuous thumb marks on the victim’s throat, Detective Sergeant McIver quickly deduced that the killer was none other than the infamous “strangler fiend” who had already slain twenty victims in the States. The Winnipeg P.D. had recently received a circular describing the homicides from the Buffalo police.

  Mrs. Patterson hadn’t been a landlady, but in every other respect her murder bore all the earmarks of the killer’s m.o. Surmising that, if the strangler struck again, he would probably seek out his favorite type of victim, Chief Detective George Smith immediately directed all available personnel to visit every rooming house in Winnipeg.

  Apprised of these developments by her morning paper, Catherine Hill was not at all surprised when, shortly before noon on Saturday, June 11, two detectives showed up at her home. She invited them into her parlor, where they proceeded to question her about her lodgers. Had any suspicious-looking men rented rooms from her recently? Had any of her boarders checked out in a hurry during the last few days? To both these questions Mrs. Hill answered, “No.”

  She wasn’t lying, at least as far as she knew. Her only new lodger was Mr. Woodcoats. But in spite of his coarse appearance, he had turned out to be such a devout and idealistic young man that it never occurred to Mrs. Hill that he might be a murder suspect. Besides, though she hadn’t laid eyes on him since Thursday evening when he’d unexpectedly appeared at her kitchen doorway, she believed that he was still residing at her house. He had certainly never checked out. Indeed, she was still expecting the two-dollar balance he owed on his rent.

  By the following morning, however, Sunday, June 12, Mrs. Hill had begun to feel troubled by doubts, which grew stronger by the hour as the day passed with no sign of Mr. Woodcoats. Finally, at around 4:30 P.M., she mounted the stairs and, after knocking on his door and receiving no response, let herself into the room.

  Two things struck her immediately. One was the state of the room, which had clearly not been occupied since Friday morning when she had come upstairs to clean. The bed had obviously not been slept in, and the fresh towel she had placed on the bureau was untouched. The other thing that struck her was the stink—a thick, fetid odor like the stench of decay.

  Mrs. Hill assumed that she was smelling the lingering reek of the unbathed Mr. Woodcoats, which had intensified in the closeness of the shut-up room. Wrinkling her nose, she crossed to the window, raised the blinds, and threw open the sash. Sunlight and clean air poured into the room. Turning, she headed for the landing, leaving the door wide-open behind her.

  Downstairs, she summoned her husband and shared her concern. She was afraid that she might have inadvertently lied to the police. She now believed that Mr. Woodcoats had, in fact, absconcded without paying his rent.

  Mr. Hill promised that he would stop off at the police station on his way to church that evening. He left the house at around 5:30 P.M. Arrriving at the Central Station about twenty minutes later, he was interviewed by Chief of Detectives George Smith, who was intensely interested in what the old man had to say. Hoping that the landlady might be able to identify the discarded men’s clothing found at the Patterson house, Smith immediately ordered one of his men to convey it to Smith Street.

  Even as the detective was on his way to the Hills’ boardinghouse, however, a discovery was taking place there that, for sheer sensational horror, almost matched the melodrama of William Patterson’s experience.

  One of Mrs. Hill’s lodgers was a man named Bernhardt Mortenson. Mortenson and his wife occupied a spacious room just off the parlor, one of the nicest in the house. Its only disadvantage was its distance from the bathroom, which was located on the second-floor landing.

  After returning from a midday outing with his wife at around 6:00 P.M. on Sunday, Mortenson went upstairs to use the facilities. As he walked back towards the stairwell a few minutes later, he passed the little room at the head of the landing, the one that had been recently rented to the new arrival, Mr. Woodcoats. For the past few days, Woodcoats’ door had been continuously shut. Now it stood open.

  As Mortenson began descending the stairs, he happened to glance over into Woodcoats’ room. In the late afternoon sunlight that slanted through the window, he thought he could make out something peculiar beneath the bed. Pausing, he squinted at the thing, then let out a gasp. The sight was so startling that he had to grab hold of the bannister to keep his balance.

  Fleeing downstairs, he shouted for the landlady, who came bustling out of the kitchen in alarm.

  “What’s wrong?” she cried.

  Mortenson was a Dane and, even under the best of circumstances, his English was shaky. Now he was barely coherent.

  “Mrs. Hill! Upstairs! Somebody there!”

  When the landlady stood frozen in perplexity, he grabbed her by an elbow and urged her upstairs.

  Inside Woodcoats’ room, Mortenson gestured wildly towards the bed. “Under there!” he shouted. Mrs. Hill had never seen him look so pale. Dread welled up inside her as she lowered herself to one knee and peered beneath the bed.

  Wedged beneath the bedsprings was the body of a naked young girl. The slender corpse was curled on its side, turned towards the wall.

  “Oh, God!” shrieked Mrs. Hill. “It’s dead! Quick! The police!”

  Mortenson was so agitated that he forgot there was a telephone in the parlor. Tearing downstairs, he ran to the house of a neighbor, Harvey Pape, who listened in astonishment to Mortenson’s frantic story, then put in a call to the Central Station.

  By late Sunday afternoon, the Winnipeg police were more convinced than ever that Emily Patterson had been killed by the same itinerant madman who had already slain twenty women throughout the United States. Chief Christopher H. Newton, who was in Windsor, Ontario, attending the annual International Police Chiefs’ Convention, had been keeping abreast of the situation in his city by wire and telephone. As it happened, another participant in the conference was Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson of San Francisco, who had been involved in the strangler case from the beginning.

  Matheson not only concurred with the belief that the strangler was now at large in Canada but offered to stop off in Winnipeg on his way back to San Francisco and assist in any way he could. In the meantime, Newton and his second-in-command, Acting Chief Constable Philip Stark, had decided to issue a citywide alert.

  By 6:00 P.M. on Sunday, a bulletin had been drafted. Before it could be broadcast over the radio, however, word arrived at Cen
tral Station that another victim had been found in a Smith Street boardinghouse.

  The discovery of the second slaying confirmed the worst fears of the police. The bulletin was quickly revised. At approximately 6:30 P.M., an announcer broke into the weekly broadcast of the Sunday evening church service with the news that two local women had been strangled to death by a killer, believed to be the same “notorious murderer wanted for twenty similar murders in the United States.”

  “All women with ‘rooms to let’ or ‘for sale’ signs on houses are cautioned,” the announcer intoned. “This man may have taken a room from you in the last few days, or he may come to your house for a room or to see the house. Do not admit him if you are alone. Keep your door hooked and put him off. Watch where he goes and notify the police as soon as you can. Don’t get excited. If you have a ‘for sale’ or ‘for rent’ sign on your house, this man will seek a pretext to enter your home. Do not admit any stranger; you will then be safe. Do the same as we are asking the rooming keepers to do. Put him off and notify the police.”

  Listeners were warned to be on the lookout for a man “twenty-six to thirty years of age, about five foot six or seven inches tall, weighing about 150 pounds with large dark eyes, full face, sallow complexion, clean shaven, dark brown hair, and broad shouldered. Evidently a transient of Jewish or Italian appearance but might be any nationality. He speaks good English.”

  The police announcer concluded with a final plea to “all railway men, both passenger and freight crews, to help us catch this fiend, who is a degenerate of the worst type, and protect other defenseless women.”

  Even before the Sunday evening radio broadcast was interrupted by the special police bulletin, word of the latest murder had swept through the Hills’ neighborhood. By 7:00 P.M., Smith Street was so jammed that motorists had to detour around the block. Before the evening ended, more than 500 people—men, women, children, and a growing mob of reporters—would gather at the scene.

  While a pair of constables guarded the entranceway—keeping both gawkers and newsmen at bay—the crowd milled around the boardinghouse, exchanging hearsay and straining to see through the glowing, second-story window where grim, blue-coated figures moved about the room. The atmosphere on the block was charged with that peculiar mix of shocked disbelief and morbid excitement characteristic of crime scenes.