Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (27 page)
Read Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of Online
Authors: Harold Schechter
“With the strength of frenzy” (in one historian’s words), Maren—wounded now herself—managed to get her sister into the bedroom and shut the door against Wagner, who rattled it furiously while Maren held it closed with all her strength.
Anethe, in the meantime, lay cowering in bed. Now, as Maren shouted at her to escape, she rose unsteadily to her feet and crawled out the low window.
“Scream!” Maren cried, hoping that Anethe’s shouts for help might carry to nearby Star Island. But—standing there barefoot in the frozen night, clad only in a flimsy nightdress and paralyzed with fear—Anethe was unable to obey. “I cannot make a sound,” was all she managed to say.
At that moment, Wagner stepped around the corner of the house.
As he strode toward Anethe, the moonlight illuminating his face, a shriek finally burst from the throat of the terror-stricken young woman: “Louis! Louis!”
That moment of recognition would prove fateful for Louis Wagner, though the retribution that ultimately befell him, however deeply deserved, seemed insufficient reprisal for the atrocities he was about to commit.
Leaning against the house was an axe that Maren had used earlier that day to chop away ice from the well. Wagner grabbed it. “Oh, Louis, Louis, Louis,” Anethe sobbed as he advanced upon her. As Maren, standing at the window only a few feet way, watched in thunderstruck horror, he brought the axe down on Anethe’s head, cracking it open. She sank without a sound, blood pouring into the snow. The blow was undoubtedly fatal, but Wagner was taking no chances. He stood over her, striking her shattered skull again and again.
In a frenzy of terror, knowing that Wagner would be coming for them in a matter of seconds, Maren begged her sister to get up and run. “I cannot,” Karen moaned. “I haven’t the strength.” At that instant, footsteps sounded from the kitchen; the killer had reentered the house. Now it was either flee or die for Maren. Grabbing the nearest garment, a skirt, she threw it over her shoulders, climbed out the window, hurried past the slaughtered corpse of Anethe, and—with the little dog, Ringe, following close on her heels—searched desperately for a hiding place.
As she stumbled barefoot over ice and rocks toward the farthest end of the island,
she could hear her sister’s anguished shrieks as Wagner continued his butchery, delivering such powerful blows that the axe handle broke, then garroting the dying woman with a scarf. Half frozen, almost beside herself with fear, Maren climbed down toward the ocean and, on hands and knees, wedged herself between two rocks at the water’s edge, clutching Ringe to her body for warmth. Wagner, meanwhile, had begun a frantic search for the last surviving witness to his atrocities. It was a situation so nightmarish that it has become a staple of horror movies: an implacable monster hunting for a young woman who huddles nearby in absolute terror, barely daring to breathe for fear that her hiding place will be discovered.
Unable to find his prey, Wagner returned to the cottage, where he dragged Anethe by her feet into the kitchen. He then began to ransack the house, breaking into boxes and trunks, emptying bureau drawers. From his familiarity with the Hontvets’ fishing business, he had expected to find as much as $600, but his rummaging turned up less than $20. Then came an act that, even more than the murders themselves, struck later observers as indicative of Wagner’s utter depravity. With the corpses of his two victims lying a few feet away, he prepared a pot of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to refresh himself with a meal before setting off on his long row back to Portsmouth.
In the morning, Maren waited until the sun was fully risen before crawling from her shelter and making her way on torn and frozen feet to the northernmost tip of Smutty Nose, where her frantic shouts brought help from the neighboring island of Appledore. Bloody, bruised, and in a state of near-delirium, she was ferried across the water to the home of a family named the Ingebertsens, where she was sheltered and cared for, while a group of armed men from Appledore scoured the island for Wagner. By then, however, the killer was long gone.
A
FTER MAKING HIS
way to Portsmouth, Wagner had eaten a meal, changed his clothing, then boarded a train for Boston. There, he purchased a new suit of clothes, a hat, and a pair of boots, got his long beard shaved and his hair trimmed, and holed up in a room at a sailors’ boardinghouse. Within twenty-four hours, however, word of the Smutty Nose atrocities had spread via telegraph throughout the country, and Wagner’s name was in newspapers throughout New England. Arrested that same afternoon, Thursday, March 6, 1873, he was transported back to Portsmouth, where a mob of ten thousand people, bent on a lynching, had to be kept back at bayonet point by a company of marines.
Owing to a jurisdictional dispute, Wagner was tried in Maine. Put on the stand, he tearfully protested his innocence, asserting his faith that God would save him while suggesting that the real culprit was John Hontvet, who had murdered the women because “he was tired of having to feed so many relatives.” At the end of the nine-day proceedings, the jury took less than an hour to convict him of murder in the first degree. At the announcement of the verdict, the courtroom erupted in cheers. Wagner was placed in a carriage and driven back to the county jail, while jeering throngs lined the route, pelting the vehicle with stones. Arrived at the newly built jailhouse, he reportedly announced to his guards that he would “be out of here a free man within one week.”
He made good on his boast on Wednesday, June 26, 1873, when he managed to jimmy open the lock of his cell with some wooden implements and slip away into the night, leaving a “well-constructed dummy made of a variety of objects” lying beneath the blanket of his cot. The ruse wasn’t discovered until guards came to distribute breakfast the following morning. A massive manhunt was immediately launched. After contriving a cunning escape, however, Wagner “did not know what to do with his liberty.” Wandering aimlessly around the countryside, he subsisted on wild berries and slept in the open until, “ragged and weary,” he was captured four days later and returned to jail.
After two years of legal delays, he was finally put to death on June 25, 1875, alongside another multiple murderer named John True Gordon who, on the morning of the scheduled execution, attempted suicide by severing his femoral artery with a smuggled-in shoemaker’s knife. Though Gordon was bleeding to death, officials decided that the legalities must be observed. He was carried, semiconscious, to the gallows and held upright by a couple of deputies until the noose was placed around his neck and the trap sprung. Wagner, standing on his own two feet, offered one final proclamation of innocence before plunging to his death. The spectacle was so ghastly that it led to the abolition of capital punishment in Maine.
As chance would have it, one of the minuscule number of people residing on the Isles of Shoals at the time of the Smutty Nose murders was a significant literary figure, America’s most widely read woman poet of her time. Her name was Celia Laighton Thaxter.
Thaxter grew up on the isles. Between the ages of four and ten, she and her family were the sole inhabitants of White Island, where her father, Thomas Laighton, served as lighthouse keeper. In 1841, the Laightons moved to the largest of the islands, Appledore, where Thomas undertook the construction of a guesthouse, said to be the first summer resort on the Atlantic coast. Appealing to the sort of sightseer who, as one writer puts it, responds to “that strange beauty which dwells in desolate places,” Laighton’s hotel, Appledore House, began attracting a small but steady stream of vacationers, among them some of New England’s most eminent artists and writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Childe Hassam, James Russell Lowell, and Richard Henry Dana.
Laighton’s partner in this enterprise was a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard graduate, Levi Lincoln Thaxter, who also served as an occasional tutor to Celia and her two brothers. In 1851, not long after Celia’s sixteenth birthday, he took her as his wife.
Four years later, after trying and failing at a variety of pursuits, Thaxter moved his family—which now included two young sons—to Newtonville, Massachusetts. Celia, who had rarely set foot on the mainland since the age of four, suddenly found herself trapped in what she described as a “household jail.” Pining for the stark beauties of her childhood home, she vented her homesickness in verse, composing an autobiographical poem called “Land-locked” that appeared to great acclaim in the March 1861 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
.
Soon Thaxter was publishing poetry in all the leading periodicals of the day and hobnobbing with the likes of Charles Dickens. Even as her literary career flourished, however, her marriage grew increasingly strained. While Levi—who had developed a taste for warmer climes—made extended visits to the South, Celia took to spending long stretches back on Appledore. As a result, she was there in March 1873 when her beloved isles became the site of Louis Wagner’s atrocities, a crime so appalling that her own estimate of it—“one of the most monstrous tragedies ever enacted on this planet,” she would claim—seems only slightly hyperbolic.
On the morning after the atrocity, Thaxter was working at her desk on the second floor of her family house on Appledore when she became aware of a commotion outside her window: men hurrying back and forth, some armed with guns. Alarmed shouts of “Trouble at Smutty Nose!” Then the sound of women wailing: “Karen is dead! Anethe is dead! Louis Wagner has murdered them both!”
Rushing downstairs, Thaxter, upon hearing that Maren Hontvet had been taken to the Ingebertsen cottage, hurried to her side and found her lying in bed, “half crazy,” her eyes “wild, glittering, dilated.” Clutching Thaxter’s hand, Maren, in her broken English, cried: “Oh, I am so glad to see you! I so glad I save my life!” Then she related the horrible tale to Thaxter, the first to hear it from the survivor’s own lips.
Two years later, Thaxter’s lengthy account of the crime, based on her direct, firsthand knowledge of the Smutty Nose horror, appeared in the May 1875 issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
. Titled “A Memorable Murder,” it stands as the first genuinely modern work of American true crime literature, predating Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
by nearly a century. Though Capote is widely regarded as the first American writer to apply a sophisticated aesthetic sensibility to true crime writing, legitimizing a genre that had always been viewed with critical contempt, that honor really belongs to Celia Thaxter, the once renowned, now forgotten poet who transformed a case of real-life horror into a bona fide work of literary art.
[
Sources: Report of the Trial and Conviction of Louis Wagner for the Murder of Anethe Christenson (Saco, ME: William S. Noyes, 1874); Edmund Pearson, Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926); Celia Thaxter, “A Memorable Murder,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1875; Richard Dempewolff, Famous Old New England Murders (Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Day Press, 1942).
]
THE NORTHWOOD MURDERER
I
T’S A COMMON MISCONCEPTION THAT SERIAL MURDER IS A RELATIVELY RECENT
phenomenon that began roughly in the Victorian era with the depredations of Jack the Ripper. Anthropological evidence makes it depressingly clear that human beings have been butchering each other since the days when our prehistoric ancestors dined on each other’s brains and collected human body parts as hunting trophies. That our species has always indulged in extraordinarily barbaric behavior is made clear in everything from ancient Greek myths such as the story of Atreus (who butchered his brother’s sons and baked them in a cannibal pie) to fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” (which, in the view of many scholars, reflects the atrocities of real-life lycanthropes such as Peter Stubbe, a medieval lust killer who preyed on more than a dozen children, ripping them to pieces with the savagery of a wolf).
Decades before Jack the Ripper embarked on his ghastly spree, a sexual mutilation murderer every bit as monstrous as the Whitechapel fiend was at large in our own country. Precisely why he has been so thoroughly forgotten while the Ripper has achieved mythic status is a mystery. The killings he confessed to matched the Ripper’s tally, their savagery was no less extreme, and the nature of his crimes was arguably even more shocking, since (like Peter Stubbe) he preyed primarily on children.
His name was Franklin Evans, and in the eyes of his contemporaries, he was “the most monstrous and inhuman criminal of modern times—or indeed of any time.”
O
N
M
ONDAY
, J
UNE
12, 1865, fifteen-year-old Isabella Joyce and her twelve-year-old brother, John—children of a recently widowed seamstress residing in Lynn, Massachusetts—paid a visit to their grandmother in Roxbury. At around eleven in the morning, they expressed a desire to explore a nearby forested area known as May’s Woods. After some initial reluctance, the grandmother finally relented. She packed them a lunch, gave them ten cents each for trolley fare, and told them to return no later than 2:00 p.m. She never saw them alive again.
When the children failed to return, their grandmother became frantic. For the next five days, search parties scoured the woods around Roxbury. It wasn’t until Sunday, June 18, however, that two men, John Sawtelle and J. F. Jameson—while hiking across the estate of the Bussey family in West Roxbury—stumbled upon the remains of the missing children.
From the evidence, it seemed clear that Isabella and her little brother had been playing happily in the woods, creating little hillocks of moss and fashioning wreaths out of oak leaves and twigs, when they were unexpectedly set upon. Their assailant—a “fiend in human shape,” as the newspapers called him—attacked the girl first, savaging her body with a dagger, then tearing off her undergarments and raping her. There were twenty-seven stab wounds on her torso and another sixteen on her neck. The ground all around her corpse was clotted with blood. She had apparently put up a desperate fight, grabbing the long blade of the dagger and attempting to wrest it from her killer. The index finger of her right hand was completely severed and the rest of her fingers nearly cut off. Her clothes were soaked in blood, and clumps of grass had been shoved into her mouth to stifle her cries.