Famed architect Stanford White, some thirty years older than Evelyn, contrived to seduce her. Once he got her mother out of the way, he took Evelyn to his suite at 22 West 24th Street, introduced her to his “mirror room,” and used a drug to knock her out. She woke up and realized she’d been defiled. Although White continued their liaison for a while, making her even more famous as “the girl in the red velvet swing,” his interests soon turned to other young girls. Evelyn, in love, held out hope that he might one day return to her.
In the meantime, fabulously wealthy railroad heir Harry Kendall Thaw—the Prince of Pittsburgh—saw Evelyn performing in a show. He was instantly besotted. He kept returning to the theater over and over to see her. Today, we’d probably call him a stalker. Eventually she allowed him into her life, probably to keep getting the gifts and advantages he gave her, and he took her on an extended vacation in Europe, begging her to marry him. Although she turned him down repeatedly, his wealth won her over, especially since “Stanny” did not return. Still, White did warn her about Thaw’s rumored instability.
Thaw, who was obsessed with virginity, forced Evelyn to admit to what White had done to her. He was well aware of White’s reputation as a ladies’ man and “defiler of virgins.” She admitted to it and succumbed to Thaw’s insistent proposals. Evelyn married Thaw in 1905 and moved to Pittsburgh. When they stopped in New York the following year on their way to Europe, they encountered White at Madison Square Garden, one of the more than fifty buildings he’d designed. At the time, it stood on Madison Square, at 26th and Madison, just a few blocks from the love nest where he’d seduced Evelyn.
Thaw grew annoyed. His obsessions with punishing White returned. He and Evelyn attended a show on the Garden’s rooftop, and afterward, White showed up at his regular table. Thaw walked over, put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger three times. He was quickly arrested.
There’s nothing like a high society murder to spawn headlines, especially over a woman, and Thaw’s trial was a media sensation. It began in January 1907. There was plenty of material upon which reporters could feed, including Thaw’s unique psychiatric defense. Evelyn testified on his behalf, describing White’s “unspeakable” actions with her. However, Thaw came in for a beating, as a madam told the jury about how he’d rented a room from her under a disguised name and had subjected her girls to brutal whippings. He was a mad man!
The jury hung, so back to jail Thaw went.
At his second trial in 1908, Thaw entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. In fact, he was the first person to use “dementia praecox” as an excuse for murder. It was supposedly an “incurable” psychotic disorder, beginning after puberty and advancing until it had weakened the brain. It was actually a “trashcan diagnosis,” covering a multitude of confusing conditions. However, it worked for Thaw. He was acquitted and sent to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Fishkill.
Thaw’s mother, a social matriarch with considerable influence, persisted in pulling in favors to get him declared sane. In 1915, her efforts succeeded and Thaw was released. However, he was eventually arrested again for the brutal treatment of a young man. Once more, he successfully went through the insanity/sanity routine. Money has influence.
In an odd postscript, Dr. Carl Wickland, a psychiatrist, affirmed Thaw’s claim to insanity, saying that Thaw had actually been possessed by a demon when he shot Stanford White. Wickland had learned this strange fact from his wife, a medium. She’d claimed that the spirit of a man named Johnson had confessed to forcing Thaw to kill Stanford White. The motive was revenge against White for his seduction and rejection of Johnson’s pregnant daughter, who’d subsequently committed suicide.
Double Deception
IN SOME CITIES DURING THIS TIME, pathologists advocated for replacing the coroner system, inherited from the British tradition, with medical examiners. A growing movement insisted that training in medicine and science should be required for investigating criminal and questionable deaths. (In addition, the coroner system in New York had become stunningly corrupt.) Boston had made this transition in the late 1870s. With the mayor’s support, New York’s coroner system terminated and in 1917, Charles Norris, from the chemical and bacteriological laboratory at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, became the city’s first chief medical examiner.
He’d studied under Europe’s leading forensic practitioners and his standards were exacting. On June 11, 1920, Norris was soon involved in one of the numerous incidents that would be dubbed “the Crime of the Century.”
Around 8:30 in the morning, Marie Larsen entered the brownstone at 24470th Street, the home of her employer, Joseph Bowne Elwell, a renowned expert on the card games, bridge and whist. From a small room on the ground floor, she heard what sounded like someone breathing hard. She rushed in and found an elderly man in a chair, dressed in red silk pajamas. He was bald and nearly toothless. She could see that he’d been shot squarely in the forehead, but he was still alive. The wall behind him showed the damage that the bullet had done as it exited his head. Strangely, the bullet had bounced off the wall and come to rest on a table next to him.
The housekeeper called for her employer and sent someone for help. An ambulance arrived to take this strange man to a hospital. However, he died shortly thereafter. To Marie’s shock, this victim had been Elwell, himself. She hadn’t recognized him, because he’d cleverly hidden his baldness with a series of thick, chestnut-colored wigs. He had forty, all of the same style but with graduated lengths, so as to appear to have hair that actually grew. He also had a set of false teeth to hide the fact that he had just three teeth left.
The DA thought that Elwell had been shot as he sat chatting with someone he knew. This person had to have known him intimately, investigators believed, as he’d never allowed his friends and associates to see him without his wig and false teeth. Detectives thought the killer had been in a chair about five feet from Elwell, perhaps as a visitor. Apparently, he’d been reading his mail, as a letter delivered that morning at 7:30 a.m. lay open on the floor. A half-smoked cigarette rested on the mantel and the .45-caliber gun that fired the shot into his forehead was missing. Nothing of value had been removed, and there were many such items in plain site, including expensive art.
Elwell was just 44, although he looked considerably older without his teeth and wig. He’d made his fortune on card games, notably Whist. He was also an extravagant libertine. It turned out, there were plenty of people with a motive to want him dead, including a wife whom he’d discarded. By some estimates, his sexual conquests were in the hundreds. Many had been married. He’d also won large sums of money from the wealthy with his skill at cards, humiliating man of considerable social standing.
On Elwell’s last evening alive, he’d dined with well-to-do acquaintances. They’d attended a girly show, “Midnight Frolic,” before Elwell went alone for a nightcap at Café Montmartre. He arrived home around 4:00 a.m. He’d then called his brother and his assistant to take care of some business matters. The shot that had killed him was fired after 7:30 a.m., the time at which he’d received the delivered letter. No one admitted to having heard it.
In fact, many who knew Elwell distanced themselves at once. The last thing they wanted was to be involved in a scandal. The investigation stalled and went cold.
Many detectives believed it was suicide and someone had removed the gun. Others believed that a woman had killed him. Norris believed it was murder, based on his examination of the wound. He thought the angle was too difficult for a shot to oneself. He even performed a scientific demonstration. An elderly physician who like the media limelight openly criticized Norris for not photographing the dead man’s eyes, clinging to an outdated belief that dying eyes record the image of the last person seen. Norris ignored him.
This murder was never solved.
TO DO THIS JOB RIGHT, NORRIS KNEW HE would need a staff toxicologist, so he dipped into his personal funds to set up a lab and to hire Alexander O. G
ettler. Already employed at Bellevue and NYU, Gettler agreed to work part-time. He had no idea what he was getting himself in to. His work was soon in great demand.
To reinvent the office and change past practices, many of which were based in corruption and ineptitude, Norris attended all significant death scenes and performed regular autopsies. With his wealth and social status, he became a legendary figure.
Among other murder cases that Gettler and Norris investigated was one on Long Island that inspired novelist James M. Cain to write Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. This case attracted enormous media attention, including coverage by journalist Damon Runyon, in part because it was a torrid tale about secrets behind closed doors of seemingly ordinary family life. Let’s look at how it began.
In 1915, Ruth May Brown had married her much older boss at Hearst’s Motor Boating magazine, editor Albert Snyder. They’d had a baby daughter, Lorraine, and moved to Queensville on Long Island. A decade into this difficult marriage, the vivacious and flirtatious Ruth met Henry Judd Gray, a married corset salesman. She found him fun. Albert criticized and abused her whereas Judd doted on her. It wasn’t difficult for her to choose which man she’d rather be with. They began to meet in secret at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Eventually, they plotted to insure and then kill Albert. Ruth purchased an insurance policy for $45,000 that paid double in the event of death by mishap, and she and Judd laid a plan for this impending “mishap.” As it turned out, it wasn’t a very good plan.
Gray’s part was to purchase chloroform, picture frame wire, and a five-pound sash weight with which to bludgeon Albert. On the designated night, March 19, 1927, the lovers his him in the head with the weight, stuffed his nose and mouth with rags soaked in chloroform, and wrapped the wire around his throat. Staging the room to resemble a break-in robbery/homicide, Gray bound Ruth and left. They knew that Lorraine, Ruth’s daughter, would come soon.
On the morning of Sunday, March 20, Lorraine discovered her mother bound and seemingly unconscious. She rushed to a neighbor to get help. Ruth was revived and she said that burglars had broken into her home and hit her on the head. She didn’t recall anything else. The neighbors went in search of Albert. They found him in the bedroom, lying facedown. Picture wire was twisted around his neck and he was stiff and cold. Albert was dead. Lorrained summoned the police.
Recounting her experience for investigators, Ruth said that she and Albert had gone to a bridge party the evening before. They’d returned home around 2 a.m. She’d been asleep when an “Italian-looking” man came at her. She’d lost consciousness and woke up to find herself bound.
However, the scene contradicted Ruth’s tale of a robbery, since portable valuables were visible in various places and there was no sign of forced entry. In addition, Ruth had no injury where she’d supposedly been knocked out and her hands had not been bound. Several of Ruth’s expensive rings were found under a mattress and her fur coat was in the basement. When they discovered the bloodstained sash weight in the basement as well, Ruth confessed. She implicated her lover as the killer. He’d forced her, she said, into complying.
Judd Gray was arrested carrying a bottle of whiskey, but he was just as quick to point an accusing finger back at the woman he supposedly loved. She was the one who’d bludgeoned her husband. She’d seduced him, Judd said, into bringing the implements. Then he’d acted in self-defense when Albert struggled with him.
The case came into Norris’s office and Gettler soon established that both defendants had lied.
For the April 1927 trial, the courthouse installed 50 phones to accommodate the crush of journalists who came into town. Celebrities like Will Durant and D. W. Griffith got reserved seats. Even some British royalty showed up. The defendants put on quite a show, with Ruth fainting often and Judd Gray in tears.
Gettler testified in their joint trial, before a roomful of journalists, writers, and celebrities, about what the physical evidence proved concerning the events that night. The audience hung on his every word. First, he’d tested the whiskey removed from Gray and found a lethal amount of bichloride of mercury. In addition, toxicology reports indicated that Albert Snyder had been so drunk on bootleg alcohol, as well as treated to so much chloroform, he could not have fought with anyone. These substances would have killed him. Thus, Gray’s self-defense tale was a sham.
On May 9, 1927, after ninety minutes of deliberations, the jury found Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced them to death. Each wrote a self-promoting autobiography that vilified his or her former partner. As was fitting, they were executed in the electric chair in Sing Sing on the same day, January 12, 1928. So much for their great romance. Gettler had even suggested that Ruth had poisoned the whiskey that Gray carried away in the hope that he would drink it and die. Whatever her intent, the plan had failed.
A Fish Story
THE NAME, ALBERT FISH, CONJURES UP a hideous image of one of the strangest and most twisted killers who ever lived.
It was six years after a ten-year-old child named Grace Budd went missing that Fish became famous, after he told the child’s mother exactly what he had done. He hadn’t even targeted Grace in the first place, but she’d walked into the room at the wrong time and instantly grabbed his attention. He pretended to be a kindly older man, “Frank Howard,” who was interested in employing Grace’s older brother on his farm. He returned to the family’s home in Manhattan on June 3, 1928 with a letch for Grace and an elaborate plan.
Fish told the Budds that he wanted to take Grace to a birthday party. Her parents had been afraid that if they didn’t let her go, they would antagonize their son’s future employer and thus lose him the job he desperately needed. When Grace did not return, the Budds called the police, who informed them that “Frank Howard” had given them a false name and address. They believed the worst.
Just the year before, young Billy Gaffney had been kidnapped from Brooklyn and eight-year-old Francis McDonnell from Staten Island in 1924. He’d been found, strangled. Both incidents were associated with an older man who’d been seen in the area.
William F. King, a detective lieutenant at the Missing Persons Bureau, took over the Budd investigation, but he chased down many bad leads and arrived at many frustrating dead-ends. That is, until November 11, 1934. Grace’s mother, Delia, received a letter, which she turned over to Detective King. It was full of vulgar descriptions, but the gist was that Grace’s kidnapper was confessing to a horrible murder. He’d taken Grace to an abandoned property, strangled her, cut her into pieces, and put her flesh into a stew.
“First I stripped her naked,” he wrote. “How she did kick -- bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.”
The letter was not signed, but the handwriting matched that on the Western Union form from a telegram that Frank Howard had sent the Budds to announce his arrival just before he snatched little Grace. This was the guy!
The stationery provided a new lead, which paid off. A trap was set and Albert Fish walked right into it. This “undersized wizened house painter with restless eyes and thin, nervous hands,” as reporters referred to him, denied everything before finally confessing. Fish said that he’d originally intended to kidnap Edward Budd, but decided that Edward was too large. Then he’d spotted Grace. He’d been pleased that he’d so easily taken her away. She’d even grabbed his dismemberment tools when he nearly left them on the train.
In a state of sexual arousal that lasted over a week, he’d consumed the stew he’d made with her parts. Fish took police to the abandoned cottage and showed them where he’d tossed Grace’s bones. Her skull was visible in the dirt behind a stone wall, along with a rusty cleaver, saw, and more bones.
A trial date was set, but the psychiatrist e
mployed to examine Fish for the defense was the eminent Fredric Wertham, the senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital. Wertham spent many hours with him, learning how the New York hospitals had released this demented man over and over when he was clearly a danger.
Fish had married four times and had six children. His first wife had run off with another man, so he’d raised the kids on his own. Fish claimed that his wife’s departure, and her betrayal, opened up the “floodgates” of his sexual troubles.
Wertham listed eighteen separate deviant sexual practices, including cannibalism, coprophagia, masochism, sadism, vampirism, and necrophilia. “There was no known perversion that he did not practice, and practice frequently.” He also believed that Fish was psychotic and prone to religious mania. Mostly, he was a masochist. “I have always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me,” Fish told the psychiatrist.
Fish compared himself with Harry Thaw, whom I described above. Believing himself at times to be Christ or Abraham, and obsessed with sin and atonement, Fish had made a practice of beating himself with spiked paddles and sticking lit cotton balls into his anus. “The trouble with pain,” he said, “is you get tough and always have to invent something worse.” He also stated that he “had to” kill children as a sacrifice to please God. In his drive to experience the extremes of pain, Fish actually shoved needles into the area of his groin between the anus and scrotum, and according to X-ray evidence, over two dozen were still there.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 10
