Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (2 page)

D
URING THE LATE SUMMER AND EARLY FALL OF 2010—WHILE THIS BOOK WAS
still in progress—the country was riveted by the trial of Steven J. Hayes, accused of one of the most monstrous crimes in recent memory. Three years earlier, on the night of July 23, 2007, Hayes and an accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky—a pair of small-time hoodlums who had bonded at a halfway house for parolees—invaded the home of Dr. William A. Petit in the bucolic community of Cheshire, Connecticut. After savagely beating and binding the fifty-year-old endocrinologist, they proceeded to terrorize and torture his family, raping his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and at least one of the couple’s two daughters. In the morning, they forced Hawke-Petit to go to the local bank and withdraw $15,000, after which they brought her back home, strangled her to death, doused the children—Hayley, seventeen, and Michaela, eleven—with gasoline and set the house on fire. Only Dr. Petit managed to survive.

The horror visited upon the Petit family was so appalling that even passionate opponents of the death penalty were willing to make an exception in this case. Indeed, among the mild-mannered citizenry of Cheshire, there were many who felt that lethal injection was far too mild a punishment for the perpetrators of such an atrocity. Hayes and Komisarjevsky were the objects of universal detestation, their names synonymous with incomprehensible evil.

Yet for all the attention the case received, including major coverage on network TV news, if you were to mention those names today, few people would be able to identify them. In contrast to, say, the Fall River murders of 1892 or the double slaying of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman a century later, the Cheshire tragedy seems unlikely to become one of those landmark crimes that exert a strange, enduring grip on the communal imagination.

As a student of American serial murder, I’ve often wondered why certain psychopaths have achieved near-mythic status, while other once-notorious killers, guilty of equally heinous crimes, have been completely forgotten. There’s a centuries-old phrase, dating at least as far back as Shakespeare’s time, for something that generates widespread, often frenzied interest for a few fleeting days and then fades into total oblivion: a nine-day wonder. Our voracious celebrity culture is full of these diversions: a homeless man with the golden voice of a radio announcer, for example, who achieves dizzying TV stardom for a week before subsiding again into obscurity, or a chorus line of bridesmaids and their escorts whose dancing entrance down the wedding aisle makes them a momentary media sensation. Enormities such as the slaughter of the Petit family, which transfix the nation for a little while and then vanish from memory, seem like the nightmarish equivalent of such phenomena: nine-day horrors, as it were.

To the public, the press, and even the perpetrators themselves, these sensationally shocking homicides often seem, at the time of their commission, to be crimes of historic proportion. Immediately after the 1866 execution of Martha Grinder, one of the most notorious serial murderers of her day, the
Chicago Tribune
proclaimed that the world “will never forget or cease to shudder at her monstrous deeds”—a prediction that has proved to be completely mistaken. Her contemporary Lydia Sherman, an even more prolific serial poisoner, was so infamous in her lifetime that children sang ditties about her: “Lydia Sherman is plagued with rats / Lydia has no faith in cats / So Lydia buys some arsenic / And then her husband gets sick / And then her husband he does die / And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.” Today—when people can still recite the nursery rhyme about Lizzie Borden’s forty whacks—Sherman is remembered, if at all, only by the most devoted students of American crime.

In his own time, the psychopathic scholar Edward Ruloff was enough of a criminal celebrity to attract the fascinated interest of Mark Twain, who described him in print as “one of the most marvelous intellects of this or any other age.” Lizzie Halliday,
another late nineteenth-century psycho killer, was not only compared to Jack the Ripper; some people believed that she actually
was
Jack the Ripper. The Gilded Age sociopath Harry Hayward—trumpeted in the press as “the most depraved, the most cold-blooded murderer ever to walk” the earth—achieved such notoriety that early marketers of Edison’s phonograph rushed out a wax-cylinder recording of his confession to feed the morbid appetites of the public.

Hayward, who fancied himself the “Napoleon of crime,” believed that his name would go down in the annals of infamy alongside those of Dr. H. H. Holmes and the San Francisco sex killer Theo Durrant (aka “The Demon of the Belfry”). Other once-notorious American psychos shared the same grandiose conviction. William Edward Hickman, guilty of one of the most grisly child abductions in American history, believed that he would become as famous as Leopold and Loeb—a reasonable expectation, given the widespread shock and horror provoked by his enormity. Apart from hard-core true crime aficionados, however, no one remembers his name today, while the two Jazz Age “thrill killers” continue to be the subjects of movies, plays, and bestselling books.

Hickman’s case reveals an interesting point. While inordinately gruesome or macabre crimes might appeal to a primal human need for morbid excitement, they are not necessarily the ones that exert the deepest fascination on the public. The crimes that come to define an era tend to be those that reflect its most pressing anxieties. To grown-ups of the 1920s, for example, the pampered, joyriding, college-age hedonists Leopold and Loeb were the living embodiments of the out-of-control “Flaming Youth” of the period—just as, forty years later, Charles Manson and his depraved followers seemed like the realization of every parent’s worst nightmares about sex- and drug-crazed hippies.

Conversely, there are sensational crimes that quickly fade from the front pages because they don’t speak to prevailing societal fears. If a domestic terrorist blew up a schoolhouse full of children today, then killed himself and a bunch of onlookers by detonating a car bomb, the atrocity would certainly be remembered as one of the most infamous of our age, certainly on a par with, say, the Columbine massacre. In 1927, however, when Americans didn’t live with the pervasive dread of terrorism, that very crime—committed by a madman named Andrew Kehoe—disappeared from the public consciousness in a shockingly short time.

That our nation experienced a horrendous act of terrorist mass murder just days
before Charles Lindbergh’s epochal flight will, no doubt, come as a great surprise to most readers of this book—as it did to me when I first learned about the Kehoe case. Indeed, in researching and writing this book, I was amazed at the number of once-famous homicides I was only dimly aware of, or had never heard about at all—crimes that once held the whole country rapt with horror, committed by some of the most atrocious killers in the annals of American murder.

There was Peter Robinson, perpetrator of a murder so appalling that it inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Anton Probst, whose systematic slaughter of all eight members of a Pennsylvania farm family matched the savagery of the Manson murders a century later. Franklin Evans, a nineteenth-century sex killer whose hideous assaults on children foreshadowed the atrocities of the 1930s pedophiliac monster Albert Fish. Charles Freeman, the Cape Cod fanatic, driven to slaughter his own child in a deranged act of religious sacrifice. Elsie Whipple and Jesse Strang, the 1820s counterparts of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, the infamous “Double Indemnity” killers of the Roaring Twenties. Harry Powers, the Depression-era Bluebeard who kept his victims in a torture bunker on his West Virginian “murder farm” and whose crimes inspired the cinematic classic
The Night of the Hunter
.

Readers will meet them all and many others in the pages of
Psycho USA
, which presents their cases in chronological order. Insofar as their dreadful deeds have become shrouded in obscurity, this book, which delves into the darkness of the forgotten past, can be considered a shadow history of American crime.

T
HE DIFFERENT ERAS IN OUR NATION’S SOCIAL HISTORY HAVE BEEN DISTINGUISHED
not only by their specific fads and fashions—the kinds of clothes people wore, food they ate, music they listened to, slang they spoke, and so on—but also by the particular criminal types that captured the public imagination: the tommy-gun-toting gangsters of the 1920s, the switchblade-wielding juvenile delinquents of the 1950s, the sex-crazed psycho killers of the 1970s, and—in our own post-9/11 age—the suicidal mass murderers, whether school and workplace shooters or apocalyptic terrorists.

During the early years of the Republic, for reasons that historians and sociologists have been at pains to understand, America was gripped by fears of a new kind of killer: the so-called family annihilator, the formerly loving father and husband who, in a sudden fit of homicidal frenzy, hideously slaughtered his children and wife. And of these nightmarish figures, perhaps the most infamous was William Beadle, perpetrator of what one contemporary described as “a crime more atrocious and horrible” than any ever committed in New England “and scarcely exceeded in the history of man.”

B
ORN IN
E
NGLAND
in 1730, Beadle emigrated to America at the age of thirty-two and eventually settled in the village of Wethersfield, Connecticut, where he operated a country store stocked with an unusually “handsome assortment of goods.” Surviving documents show him to have been possessed by the sort of overweening egotism typical of family annihilators. Though acknowledging his unprepossessing looks, he regarded himself as far superior to the run of humanity. “My person is small and mean to look on,” he wrote in one journal entry, “and my circumstances were always rather narrow, which were great disadvantages in the world. But I have great reason to think that my soul is above the common mould.” In his self-conceit, he likened himself to “a diamond among millions of pebbles.”

For several years his business thrived. Fiercely proud of his success, he maintained a handsome residence and entertained guests in grand style. He was held in high esteem by his neighbors, who saw him as an honorable tradesman, generous host, loving husband, and doting father.

In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, however, Beadle suffered reversals that left him in dire financial straits. Unable to “bear the mortification of being thought poor and dependent,” he struggled to keep “up the outward appearance of his former affluence.” Eventually, however, he succumbed to despair. The thought of being perceived as a failure by his townsmen was more than he could tolerate. “If a man, who has once lived well, meant well, and done well, falls by unavoidable accident into poverty and submits to be laughed at, despised, and trampled on by a set of mean wretches as far below him as the moon is below the sun; I say, if such a man submits, he must become meaner than meanness itself.”

Concluding that suicide was less shameful than poverty, he decided to kill himself and his family. Like other killers of his psychopathic breed, he justified his intended atrocity as an act of kindness, even love. “I mean to close the eyes of six persons through perfect humanity and the most endearing fondness and friendship; for mortal father never felt more of these tender ties than myself.” Initially, he thought he might spare his wife. After much deliberation, however, he concluded that it would be cruel “to leave her behind to languish out a life in misery and wretchedness.” With her entire family suddenly gone, death would be a mercy for her.

As he began to mull over his plan, he “kept hoping that Providence would turn up something to prevent it, if the intent were wrong.” Instead, “every circumstance, from the greatest to the smallest trifle,” only served to convince him that destroying
his family was the only sensible course. For a while, he prayed that his twelve-year-old son and three little daughters might perish accidentally, thus sparing him the necessity of killing them. To facilitate that end, he removed the protective wooden cover from the backyard well. He also encouraged them to swim in the deepest and most treacherous parts of the nearby river. When the children stubbornly survived these perils, he resolved to take more direct action.