Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (12 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
Left alone at the table, Catherine Lubee, who had initially turned down the offer of a drink, evidently decided not to let Mrs. Robinson’s beer go to waste. Though it tasted slightly peculiar, she finished it off. Within minutes, she began to feel unwell.
Not long afterward, Henrietta Robinson returned and found Mrs. Lanagan tending to Catherine, who lay groaning on a bed in the back room. Stepping to the bedside, Mrs. Robinson asked the young woman “how she felt.”
“Very poorly,” moaned Catherine, who accused Mrs. Robinson of putting “something in the beer that sickened her.”
Mrs. Robinson denied the charge with one of her preposterous lies. She “had put nothing in it,” she told the stricken young woman, “but what would do you good.” She had indeed spiked the victim’s drink, but only (so she implied) with something medicinal—a dose of vegetable bitters, perhaps, or one of the countless other nostrums peddled in those days under names like Professor Mintie’s Dyspepsia Powder or Acker’s Cathartic Extract.
Timothy Lanagan, his normally ruddy face drained of color, showed up a short time later. Staggering across the room, he collapsed on a sofa, convulsed with nausea.
“Run for the doctor,” he gasped to his horrified wife. “I am done for.”
Turning on Henrietta Robinson, who stood watching with detached interest, Mrs. Lanagan shrieked: “What have you done? You have killed the father of my children!”
“I have done no such thing,” Mrs. Robinson sniffed. She then stepped toward the sofa, as if to speak to the agonized grocer, who raised his hands and cried, “Go, woman! Go!”
Dr. Henry Adams, the Lanagans’ family physician, arrived moments later. By then, Lanagan was racked with excruciating abdominal pain and vomiting uncontrollably. Dr. Adams, recognizing at once that his patient had been poisoned, did what he could to relieve his sufferings and bolster his spirits. But Lanagan was under no illusions about his condition. “The villain has destroyed me,” he told the doctor, “and I shall not recover.”
A few hours later, with his mother kneeling at his bedside in prayer, he died in the arms of his sobbing wife. His last words to her were: “Do not grieve. You must make the best of it.”
Catherine Lubee clung to life until five o’clock the next morning. Her final hours, like those of Timothy Lanagan, were an unremitting torment.
B
Y THE TIME
death came to Catherine Lubee, Henrietta Robinson was in custody. She had been arrested the previous evening at around seven o’clock. On her way to jail, she had laughed and joked with the police officers—a harbinger of the increasingly bizarre behavior she would display throughout her long confinement.
That same evening, an autopsy on Timothy Lanagan’s corpse revealed that he had ingested enough arsenic to kill ten men. Searching Henrietta Robinson’s house, the police found a packet of the poison hidden under a carpet in her back parlor. Within twenty-four hours, they had traced it to a local druggist named William Ostrom, who confirmed that, a few weeks earlier, Mrs. Robinson had purchased four ounces of arsenic from him, ostensibly to deal with an infestation of rats from a nearby flour mill.
By the second day of her incarceration, Mrs. Robinson’s mania was already at full boil. She was possessed by paranoid delusions: a mob of two or three hundred people had broken into the jail and tried to kill her; a couple in the adjoining cell had heated a cauldron of water and threatened to boil her alive. In the ensuing months, she would fly into uncontrolled rages, demolishing the furnishings in her cell—her washstand and wardrobe, a table, several chairs, and a looking glass. These outbursts alternated with bouts of deep melancholia, and at one point she attempted suicide by swallowing sulfuric acid. Only the quick action of her jailers, who immediately summoned two physicians to her cell, saved her.
After a year-long delay, her trial finally opened in May 1854. Hordes of curiosity seekers showed up, eager to glimpse the notorious madwoman and hoping for a display of her notoriously bizarre behavior. They were not disappointed.
She arrived at the courthouse “magnificently attired in an elegant black dress, a white shirred bonnet ornamented with artificial flowers, white kid gloves, and a rich black mantilla lined with white satin.” The most striking feature of her apparel, however, was the heavy blue veil that shrouded her face and which she steadfastly refused to remove throughout the six days of the proceedings. At one point, when the exasperated judge ordered her to unveil herself, she haughtily replied, “I am here, your Honor, to undergo a most painful trial—not to be gazed at.” The sensational papers of the time quickly dubbed her with the catchy nickname by which she would thenceforth be known: “The Veiled Murderess.”
Despite abundant testimony to her mental derangement, the jury rejected the defense of insanity and returned a guilty verdict. At her sentencing, after Judge Ira Harris decreed that she be “hanged by the neck until dead,” she drew herself up, pointed a finger at him, and cried out: “Judge Harris, may the judge of judges be your judge!”
On July 27, 1855, a week before the day of her scheduled execution, her sentence
was commuted to life imprisonment in Sing Sing. Eventually she was transferred to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where she passed the last fifteen years of her life. Toward the end, when it was clear she was dying, she was urged to reveal her true identity. She answered that she had “kept the secret for half a century” and intended to “die with it.” No one came forth to claim her body, and she was buried in the hospital cemetery, veiled in mystery to the end.
Exactly why there were so many female serial poisoners in nineteenth-century America is a matter of debate. In her classic 1981 study Women Who Kill, for example, scholar Ann Jones takes a feminist view of the phenomenon. In her analysis, such “domestic fiends” (as they were portrayed in the press) were the product of patriarchal oppression, of the stifled, tyrannized lives to which married women were subjected in those benighted times. Some wives resorted to poison to escape brutal husbands. Others—crushed by poverty and deprived of career opportunities because of their gender—disposed of insured family members for financial reasons.
Whatever the sociopolitical roots of the phenomenon, one factor certainly contributed to the prevalence of poison murders in the 1800s. Back then, arsenic was everywhere, as readily available to aspiring Borgias as aspirin is today.
The preferred pesticide of its era, powdered arsenic was sold freely to anyone—man, woman, or child—not only by druggists but also by grocers. It was cheap as well. Half an ounce—enough to inflict an agonizing death on fifty people—cost just a penny. In his eye-opening book The Arsenic Century (Oxford University Press, 2010), Professor James C. Whorton relates the story of a little girl coming into a “rural grocery” in 1851 to purchase sugar, flour, currants, and other ingredients for a pudding, along with two ounces of white powdered arsenic “for the rats.” The various purchases were then wrapped in paper and tossed together into a single bundle. Another customer, observing the transaction, was taken aback. “What if the paper holding the arsenic were to tear?” he asked the grocer. “Might not the girl’s whole family be poisoned?” The grocer was unfazed. “They should mind what they’re at,” he answered with a shrug.
Ninteenth-century advertisement for arsenic soap
Needless to say, such cavalier handling of the poison did in fact result in countless fatal accidents. Transferred into unmarked jars and stored on household shelves—“as much a part of the farmer’s, shepherd’s or cottager’s cupboard as the family’s food,” in the words of one nineteenth-century commentator—it was easily mistaken for everything from sugar to flour to baking powder.
Even more extraordinary was arsenic’s bizarre popularity as a Victorian beauty product. Thanks to unsubstantiated reports emanating from Styria—a remote, mountainous area of Austria whose inhabitants supposedly used it to promote health and vigor—arsenic quickly gained a reputation both in America and in Britain as a cosmetic wonder drug. In that pre-regulation era, when the marketplace was flooded with snake oil, quack physicians began peddling dozens of products with names such as “Bellavita Arsenic Beauty Tablets” and “Dr. Campbell’s Medicated Arsenic Soap.” As late as 1902, the Sears Roebuck catalog featured an ad for something called “Dr. Rose’s Arsenic Complexion Wafers,” touted as a “sure cure for freckles, moles, blackheads, pimples, rough or muddy skin.… Even the coarsest and most repulsive skin and complexion, marred by freckles and other disfigurements, slowly changes into an unrivaled purity of texture, free from any spot or blemish whatever,” the ad trumpeted. “The pinched features become agreeable, the angular form gradually transforms itself into the perfection of womanly grace and beauty.”
In addition to its supposedly beautifying properties, arsenic was widely believed to be beneficial for a host of ills. Not only charlatans but legitimate physicians as well dispensed it for everything from insomnia to impotence, rheumatism to morning sickness. As Whorton documents, arsenic was also a common ingredient in paints, clothing fabrics, toys, wallpaper, candles, and countless other commercial items. In short—for all the infamous Borgias that the Victorian era produced—the average person was far more likely to suffer arsenic poisoning from a household product than from a homicidal maniac.
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Sources: John D. Lawson, American State Trials, vol. XI (St. Louis: F. H. Thomas Law Book Co., 1919); David Wilson, Henrietta Robinson (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855); Hollis A. Palmer, Curse of the Veiled Murderess (Saratoga Springs, NY: Deep Roots Press, 2004).
]
“THE TRIPLE MURDERER”
I
N THE VIEW OF MANY HISTORIANS, THE SINGLE MOST SENSATIONAL CRIME OF ANTEBELLUM
America was the murder of Dr. George Parkman by Harvard chemistry professor John White Webster. A member of Boston’s social elite and one of the city’s wealthiest men, the sixty-year-old Parkman—who had long since abandoned his medical practice to devote himself to his real estate business—left his Beacon Hill home at around noon on Friday, November 23, 1849. He was last seen alive at roughly 2:00 p.m. in the vicinity of the Harvard medical college.
After a week of frantic citywide searching, suspicion alighted on Professor Webster, a distinguished member of the Harvard faculty who was hopelessly in debt to Parkman. Though initial searches of Webster’s lab turned up nothing, the school janitor, an inveterate snoop named Ephraim Littlefield, took it upon himself to burrow through the basement wall at night. Breaking into a vault beneath the professor’s privy with a crowbar and chisel, he discovered a human pelvis and a dismembered leg. Others chunks of the butchered Dr. Parkman were stuffed inside a tea chest in Webster’s rooms, while fragments of the skull and his charred but unmistakable false teeth were found among the ashes from the lab oven.
Webster’s twelve-day trial in March 1850 was a bona fide media circus, covered by journalists from as far away as Paris and Berlin and attended by an estimated sixty
thousand spectators. It also proved to be a forensic milestone, the first time that dental evidence was allowed in a courtroom. The devastating testimony of Dr. Nathan Keep—who positively identified the cremated dentures as Parkman’s—was key to securing Webster’s conviction.
Shortly before his execution date, Webster made a full confession, claiming that on the fatal Friday, Parkman—who had been hounding him to make good on his long-overdue debt—showed up at the lab and threatened to ruin him. Tempers flared, angry words were exchanged, and—in a frenzy of passion—the volatile Webster snatched up a heavy piece of wood and bludgeoned his nemesis to death. He paid for his crime on August 30, 1850, when he was publicly hanged in Boston’s Leverett Square.
E
IGHT YEARS AFTER
fire-blackened fragments of George Parkman’s skull were pulled from John Webster’s lab oven, newspapers carried stories of another, similarly grisly discovery: the butchered, charred body parts of an incinerated murder victim, found in a stove in a small midwestern town. These pitiful remains were all that was left of Mrs. Olive Ward, wife of a notorious reprobate with the peculiar first name of Return, who—as one paper reported—“seems to have copied the example of Webster in the murder of Parkman.”
He was born in 1815, the son of Col. Jared Ward, a native Vermonter who had migrated westward and settled in the lush, rolling countryside of northwestern Ohio. When his mother, Huldah, died two years later, the infant—christened Return Jonathan Meigs Ward—was “put out among strangers and reared without parental care,” in the words of his earliest biographer. Exactly what hardships he suffered in his childhood will never be known. It seems fair to assume, however, that—like virtually all sociopaths—he must have been subjected to serious abuse. Even his contemporaries, who knew little about the causes of criminal psychopathology, recognized that Ward’s grim, loveless upbringing had, as one of them put it, “probably laid the foundation for that hardness of character which so marked his subsequent career.”