Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (14 page)

O
LIVE MADE
no secret of her intentions. Early Tuesday evening, February 3, she went to the home of her neighbor Mrs. Harriet Nathans, who kept a henhouse in her backyard and made a little extra money selling eggs. Olive purchased a dozen, explaining that she planned to “make some custard pies.” When asked about her recent absence, Olive informed Mrs. Nathans of her unhappiness and said “that she was going to leave Ward again soon.” At around 6:00 p.m., Olive bid her neighbor good night and, carrying the eggs in a wicker basket she had brought along, headed back to her own house. Mrs. Nathans never saw her again.

L
IBA
A
LLEN, THE
Wards’ next-door neighbor and proprietor of a little general store, had just opened her shop for business on the morning of Wednesday, February 4, when Ward came in to purchase a pound of sugar. In the course of their conversation, Ward mentioned that he and his wife were “going away early today and will be gone overnight.” Allen was therefore surprised when, late that afternoon, he noticed smoke rising from the chimney of the Wards’ little house.

At around 6:00 p.m., Ward dropped by the home of his niece, Mrs. Caroline Lewis. He stayed only long enough to tell her “that his wife had gone to the State of New York.”

Several hours later, at approximately 10:00 p.m., Liba Allen’s wife, Laura, was roused from her sleep by “unusual noises” coming from Ward’s house next door. She would hear them again at around eleven and one. They sounded, she would subsequently testify, “like someone chopping up meat with an axe.”

W
ARD WAS BACK
in Liba Allen’s store the next morning. When the shopkeeper inquired about Olive, Ward, sounding deeply aggrieved, said that she had left him again—this time for good, to “join another man in California.” She had taken the train on Tuesday night, he said—a flat contradiction of what he had told Allen the previous day.

Allen was sufficiently perplexed that later that morning he strolled over to the depot to talk to the stationmaster, who told him that “no one had got on the train from there on Tuesday night.”

Allen next headed over to the little tavern owned by Stephen Porter, situated directly across the street from Ward’s house. Porter himself had noticed some strange goings-on at the Wards’. Though the curtains had been drawn since the previous day, they blocked only the lower half of the windows, and Porter had been able to see “someone moving inside.” It looked, he later explained, “as if the person was scrubbing.”

Even as Porter and Allen spoke, they noticed, through the tavern window, Ward’s back door open and the tailor himself emerge onto the rear step. He was holding a big metal tub that he proceeded to empty into the back yard. The liquid, as Porter afterward described it, looked “like bloody water.”

That same afternoon, Porter saw “large volumes of thick, black smoke issuing from Ward’s chimney.” Over the next few days, other residents of the town, as well as a number of travelers, would see—and smell—it, too. Passing through Sylvania on his way to Toledo, a fellow named Norman Tripp was struck by the “disagreeable smell” of the “heavy, dark smoke” issuing from Ward’s chimney. His wife, Julia, “noticed the same smell. I asked my husband what it was that smelled so. I never smelled anything like it before.” For another witness, Alden Roberts, the stench was easier to describe. “It smelled like meat cooking,” he would explain, “only quite strong.”

B
Y
F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY
6, rumors had spread throughout town that Olive had met with foul play. Determined to confront Ward, Liba Allen, William Warren, and a third neighbor, Anthony Burdo, showed up at his house and managed to talk their way inside. When they asked after Olive, Ward grew immediately flustered. She had left him on Monday night, he replied, then quickly corrected himself and said she had taken the train on Wednesday. “No, wait,” he stammered, turning to Liba Allen. “What did I tell you, Mr. Allen?” When the latter said, “Tuesday,” Ward replied, “Oh yes, that was it. She left on Tuesday.” Before leaving, Allen took a good look at the floor of Ward’s shop. Though the boards had clearly been “scrubbed hard” in recent days, he noticed a spot that bore the unmistakable appearance of dried blood.

More convinced than ever that Ward had done away with his wife, the men shared
their suspicions with Constable Elijah Green, who, accompanied by a deputy named Printup, visited Ward on Friday and conducted a cursory search of the house. Green would later testify that he looked under Ward and Olive’s bed, though—in light of later revelations—it would appear that he did not look very hard. Finding nothing incriminating, the two officers left.

On Monday, February 7, a resident of Adrian, Michigan, named Charles Dolph arrived in Sylvania with a story that put a temporary halt to the nascent investigation. According to Dolph, he had seen Ward’s wife alive and well in Adrian. Five more days would pass before two of Olive’s friends, B. M. Phillips and William Chapman, traveled down from Adrian to report that, contrary to Dolph’s claim, “she was not there and had not been there since she was first missed.”

At the urging of Phillips, Constable Green immediately assembled a group of men and proceeded to Ward’s home, where they conducted a much more thorough search of the premises. This time, the worst fears of Olive’s friends and neighbors were confirmed.

It was Jason Lowden, a boarder at Porter’s tavern, who made the first grisly find—a charred section of human jawbone in an ash pile about six feet from Ward’s back door. He shouted for Green. Hurrying to Lowden’s side, the constable began sifting through the ashes and immediately turned up other anatomical remains, including fragments of a skull, several finger bones, a number of teeth, and “human entrails containing excrements” (as one Toledo paper reported). There were also remnants of Olive’s belongings: the melted lock and hinges of her trunk, parts of her parasol, two finger rings, the metal hooks and eyes of her dresses, and various buttons. More human bones were found inside the kitchen stove, while the bedroom mattress was badly stained with dried blood—as if (in the words of one of the searchers) butchered “meat had been placed on it.”

I
N CUSTODY
, W
ARD
stoutly “denied all knowledge of the murder.” His trial opened on March 16, exactly one month after his arrest. Nine days later, he was convicted and condemned to death.

In early April, against the advice of his attorneys, Ward—convinced that his sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment if he acknowledged his guilt—issued a full confession that was widely published in regional newspapers and reprinted in a
pamphlet titled The Triple Murderer. It quickly became clear to Ward that, as he put it, he “had committed a fatal error.” If anything, his graphic account of the murder—“the most brutal, horrid, and disgusting in all the annals of crime,” in the overheated words of one contemporary—destroyed whatever dim prospects he had for a commutation and sealed his doom.

Though Ward had arrived at the decision to kill Olive as early as Monday, February 1, it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that he “determined to put my resolve into execution.” As she stooped over to put on her shoes after rising from bed, he snuck up behind her with a clothes iron and “struck her a blow on the right side of the head, near the top, which broke in her skull and felled her to the floor. The blood flowed considerably from the wound and from her mouth and nose, and I took a couple of quilts and placed them under her to prevent it from oozing out on the floor. She struggled but little and did not speak after I struck her, and died in about fifteen minutes.”

After rolling “up the body in two quilts” and shoving “it under the bed,” he “stepped over to Liba Allen’s store and purchased a pound of sugar, saying to him that we were going away and should be gone all day.” Having “thus secured myself against interruption,” he then returned to his house and, after drawing the curtains and locking the doors, sat down to “reflect on what I should do with the body. To take it out and bury it was impossible.” With the “example of Professor Webster in mind,” it “occurred to me that perhaps I might burn it. Something must be done; no time was to be lost.”

He went about the gruesome task with chilling deliberation:

Over the course of the next week, Ward incinerated the remains bit by bit. He was inadvertently aided by the never-explained report from Charles Dolph—which, by temporarily allaying community suspicion, afforded Ward extra time to dispose of the corpse—and by the slipshod search conducted by Constable Green, who failed to notice the wash boiler full of chopped-up body parts stored under Ward’s bed. By Sunday morning, February 14, after throwing the few remaining “slices of her flesh” into the stove and burning up “every article of clothing that had belonged to my wife, along with her trunk, her parasol, her rings, etc.,” he “had, as I supposed, completely obliterated all the evidence of her previous existence.”

O
NLY FIFTY WITNESSES
were invited to attend Ward’s execution inside Lucas County Prison on Friday, June 12, 1857. Throughout the grim proceedings, they maintained a suitably solemn demeanor, “very similar to a gathering at a funeral.” Outside the prison walls, however—where thousands of curiosity seekers had gathered—the mood was so festive that one reporter described the affair as a “hanging bee,” complete
with young boys “engaged in pitching pennies and in racing from point to point, as if to make the most of a holiday occasion.”

Like so many psychopaths who are capable of feeling pity only for themselves, Ward spent his final minutes babbling in terror and insisting that he was a decent “hard working man” who had “always kept genteel company and never stole any money at all.” His final words before the trap was sprung at five minutes before noon were: “Oh my God, I am thine! Thou art mine!”

Burned Alive

Not every killer has been as methodical as John White Webster and Return J. M. Ward when it comes to cremating a victim. A particularly horrific example was the young Depression-era madman Lawrence Clinton Stone.

The black sheep of an old and distinguished New England family that traced its American roots back to the Mayflower pilgrims, the troubled, somewhat feeble-minded Stone did several stints in reformatories during his adolescence. By his early twenties, he was estranged from most of his family, longtime residents of the town of Litchfield, Connecticut.

On Sunday afternoon, October 14, 1934, Stone, then twenty-four-years old, was loitering on East Third Street in Mount Vernon, New York, where he had once been employed as a worker on a street-widening project. Across from where he stood, a five-year-old girl named Nancy Jean Costigan was happily playing with a small rubber ball on the terrace of the Pelhutchinson Apartments, one of the most exclusive apartment buildings in Mount Vernon. Nancy Jean’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Costigan of Forest Hills, New York, were upstairs visiting friends.

At around 5:00 p.m., the building hallman, Carl Hutchinson, decided to go down to the basement to adjust the oil-burning furnace. Walking around to the basement entrance, which opened onto a side street called Warwick Avenue, Hutchinson was surprised to discover that the door was locked. He returned to the lobby and rode the elevator down to the basement, a dimly lit labyrinth of corridors, storage rooms, and locker space.

As he proceeded toward the steep metal staircase that descended into the subbasement, where the furnace was located, he noticed an erratic trail of red splotches that led from the Warwick Avenue entranceway across the basement floor, through the ping-pong room, and toward the subbasement.

Later, Nancy Jean’s little rubber ball would be found in the ping-pong room, where it had rolled into a corner.

As soon as Hutchinson stepped inside the subbasement, he saw a puddle of blood on the cement floor directly beneath the white-hot firebox of the furnace. He turned and ran to call the police. As he rushed for the stairway, he thought he glimpsed the shadowy figure of a thickset young man crouched in a dark corner of the basement.

A short time later, Detective Frank Springer arrived. The two men returned to the subbasement. Springer opened the furnace door. Inside were the charred remains of a young child.

Springer immediately telephoned police headquarters, and a patrol wagon, carrying two more detectives and a patrolman, was dispatched to the scene. As the wagon neared the
apartment house, however, it collided with an automobile. The three police officers were slightly injured. It took only a few minutes for an ambulance to arrive from Mount Vernon Hospital. As the attendants were seeing to the injured officers, a powerfully built young man in blood-spattered clothing stumbled up to the ambulance and clambered inside, insisting that he was badly hurt. He was driven to the hospital along with the officers. When physicians examined him, however, they discovered that he had sustained no injuries at all. At that point, the doctors couldn’t say where all the blood on his clothing had come from. But it certainly wasn’t his own.

The young man—Lawrence Clinton Stone—was taken to police headquarters for questioning. That night he confessed to the murder of Nancy Jean Costigan, though the story he stuck to at first was that the little girl’s death had been accidental. According to Stone, he had taken the child down to the basement to play catch with her. At one point, he had carelessly tossed the small rubber ball too hard and hit her on the brow. The child “toppled to
the floor,” struck her head on the cement, and began bleeding from her mouth. Stone took her limp body into his arms, began carrying her upstairs, and then—believing she was dead—panicked and decided to dispose of her body in the fire.

The Stone atrocity hits the headlines. (
Courtesy of
The Times-Tribune,
Scranton, PA
.)

Eventually Stone admitted that he had deliberately strangled the child. Investigators later ascertained that Stone had sexually assaulted the girl before he killed her, and that she had probably still been alive when he threw her into the furnace.

For all the front-page coverage it received—“Man Confesses He Cremated Girl, 5, in Furnace” was a typical banner headline—Stone’s atrocity would have received even more tabloid attention had it not been overshadowed by the even more monstrous crimes of the notorious Albert Fish, arguably the most insanely depraved serial killer in the annals of American homicide, who was arrested shortly afterward for the dismemberment murder of a ten-year-old Manhattan girl, Grace Budd, whose body he subsequently cannibalized. Locked in adjoining cells in Westchester County’s Eastview Prison while awaiting the start of their respective trials, the two pedophiliac sex-killers developed a mutual distaste for each other.

Fish, a religious fanatic who found justification for his outrages in scripture, complained to jailers that Stone’s incessant ranting made it impossible for him to concentrate on his Bible studies. “The cell I am in now is nice and light,” he wrote the warden, “but I can’t stand Stone. I can’t read my Bible with a mad man raving—cursing—snarling. Can’t you put him down at the other end?” For his part, Stone, when informed of the crime for which Fish had been arrested, declared that he found it “disgusting.”