Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (30 page)

H
IS BIRTH NAME
was Joseph Paget. Born in 1837, he grew up on a farm about fifty miles northwest of Montreal. At the age of twenty he married a local woman three years his senior from a family named Rousse. They had five children in rapid succession.

Sometime around 1862, he and his family moved to Saint Beatrice, “a little French provincial town in the bleak rolling hills of Quebec.” By then, as the
New York Times
would later report, “he had gained a very bad reputation. He abused his wife shamefully and associated with the vilest company.” It was during his years in Saint Beatrice
that he also committed his first known sex crime: the rape of his wife’s thirteen-year-old sister, Julienne, a girl he had known since her early childhood.

It happened in June 1871. At around 7:00 a.m. on the day in question, Julienne—who was working as the hired girl for a family named Lajeunesse—went off to milk the cows, her regular early morning chore. She was walking through a pasture well out of sight of the nearest dwelling when she was stopped cold by a sinister sight.

About fifty feet way stood a stocky man dressed in a red flannel shirt and baggy linen trousers held up by a leather belt. Beneath his black slouch hat, his face was concealed by a mask fashioned of buffalo skin, and in one hand he carried a pine-root cudgel about two and a half feet long and as thick as her own arm. Suddenly the man
came hurrying toward her, so fast that his hat flew off his head.

Joseph Lapage murder pamphlet

(
Courtesy of New York State Historical Association Library, Cooperstown.
)

Letting out a scream, Julienne turned on her heels and ran, but the man overtook her, grabbed her by one arm, and spun her around. As he did, the adolescent girl reached up with her free hand and tore off his mask. “I knew him very well,” she later testified. It was Joseph Lapage, her brother-in-law, his face contorted into a grimace of lust.

Gripping her around the throat, Lapage began to choke her, then threw her to the
ground and straddled her. As she struggled, he snatched up a handful of sandy soil, shoved some into her mouth to silence her, and ground the rest into her eyes. Then he pulled up her skirt and raped her. She lost consciousness before he was through.

When she came to, she staggered back home and told her employer, Joseph Lajeunesse, what had happened. An arrest warrant was issued for Lapage, but he managed to elude the law. Julienne, unable at first to hold down food or drink, took “a long month” to recover from her physical injuries. By then, her assailant had fled Canada with his wife and children.

T
HREE YEARS LATER
, at around three-thirty on the afternoon of Friday, July 27, 1874, a young teacher, Miss Marietta Ball of St. Albans, Vermont, closed up her one-room schoolhouse and set out along a lonely stretch of road to visit a friend on the south side of town. She never arrived.

The following day, search parties scouring the woods discovered her naked corpse—“hideously violated and mangled in the most fiendish manner”—lying in a little gully beneath a pile of leaves. At the inquest, the coroner, Dr. H. H. Farnsworth, determined that her skull had been crushed with a rock, though whether she was raped pre- or postmortem was impossible to say.

Determined to find the perpetrator of the outrage, her neighbors pooled their resources and brought in a detective from Boston. Interviewing everyone who knew her, including her pupils, the investigator soon learned about one suspicious character who had been “asking the schoolchildren about Miss Ball’s route home” in the weeks prior to her disappearance and who had been seen with “deep scratches and bruises” on his face immediately following her murder. Known for his generally crude character, especially toward women, the suspect had been residing in St. Albans’ “French settlement” since his arrival from Quebec three years earlier. His name was Joseph Lapage.

Lapage was promptly arrested but managed to bring forth witnesses who testified (falsely, as it would eventually appear) that he was working in a hayfield at the time of the murder and supported his claim that he had scratched his face on thorns while berry picking. With no hard evidence against him, he was released. The following March, he and his family suddenly packed up and left town. Not long afterward, they showed up in Pembroke, New Hampshire.

D
URING THE WANING
days of September 1875—just six months after Lapage moved to Pembroke—a number of townspeople spotted a strange figure lurking alongside the road that led to the local high school. Seventeen-year-old Clarence Cochran, for example, was headed for class on the last Friday of the month when, as he later testified, he “saw a man jump into the bushes on the left side of the road” about fifty feet ahead of him. Believing it was a friend named John Colby—a practical joker who liked to hide in the bushes and spring out at his unwary schoolmates—Cochran shouted: “Get out of there, you long-legged son of a gun, you can’t scare me.” When Clarence reached the spot where the figure had leapt into the undergrowth, however, no one was there.

The following day, Mrs. Albersia Watson and her youngest daughter, Annie, a student at Pembroke Academy, were walking along the same deserted stretch of road. Suddenly sensing that someone was behind them, they turned and saw “a man standing by the side of the road about a hundred feet away, holding a stick in his right hand.” Though Mrs. Watson could not make out his features, she saw that he was of stocky build with “black hair and whiskers, tan-colored overalls, and a black slouch hat.” As the mother and daughter continued on their way, the man began to follow at a rapid pace. Throwing a protective arm around her daughter—who was now whimpering in fear—Mrs. Watson hurried the girl onward. By now, the man was “partly running.” He was almost upon them when, rounding
a bend, Mrs. Watson spotted a neighbor, George Mack, picking berries in a nearby field. As Mrs. Watson steered her daughter toward Mack, she threw a quick glance over her shoulder and saw her pursuer vanish into the woods.

Josie Langmaid

That same weekend, Hiram Towle and his wife, Harriet, were driving their buggy along Academy Road when they saw “a man coming, carrying a stick behind him in a peculiar way.” As they drew up beside him, he glanced at Mrs. Towle with a look that made her quail. “I thought he might be crazy,” she would later testify. “I felt afraid of the man.” Though she had never laid eyes on Franklin Evans, she had read descriptions of the infamous “Northwood Monster” in the papers. Now, as they drove past the grubby, club-wielding figure making his way toward the high school, Mrs. Towle turned to her husband and said: “I should think that was old Evans himself if he was still alive.”

B
Y THE TIME
the Towles passed him on the road, Lapage had already set his sights on another victim—not a teacher this time but one of the female students attending Pembroke Academy. Exactly which student is unclear. It appears that his original target was either Litia Fowler, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a farmer named Trueworthy L. Fowler, or her schoolmate Sarah Prentiss.

On September 22, while threshing rye for Mr. Fowler, Lapage noticed Litia as she crossed the front yard and entered the house. He immediately began asking her twenty-year-old brother, Andrew, about the girl: who was she, where did she go to school, what road did she take to get there? Oblivious to the sinister import of the questions, “Andrew obligingly answered, even pointing out the school” when he and Lapage drove past it in a wagon a few days later.

Sarah Prentiss also caught Lapage’s prurient eye while he was working for Fowler. Spying her as she walked past the farm, he pulled aside a thirteen-year-old boy named Edwin Mahuir and grilled him about the girl, asking her name, where she lived, “who was going with her.” When he made a crude remark about “certain parts of the girl’s anatomy, young Edwin was so startled that he turned and fled.”

E
VIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT
Lapage intended to waylay either Litia Fowler or Sarah Prentiss on the morning of Monday, October 4, 1875, as they made their way to
school. Somehow his plan miscarried. By the time he arrived at the spot he had picked for the ambush, both girls were already safely seated at their desks. Their classmate Josie Langmaid wasn’t as lucky.

Just two months shy of her eighteenth birthday, Josie was a “pretty and popular girl” who usually made the two-and-a-half-mile hike to the school with her younger brother Waldo. On that fateful morning, however, Josie had promised to wait for a friend. Waldo, growing increasingly impatient, hung around with his sister until eight-fifteen when he headed off by himself. Fifteen minutes later, when the first reminder bell tolled from the academy, Josie’s friend had still not arrived. Snatching up her books and kissing her stepmother goodbye, Josie started up the road alone. At around nine o’clock—five minutes after the last reminder bell sounded—a farmer named Bernard Gile passed her as she was hurrying in the direction of the schoolhouse. He was the last villager to see her alive.

When Waldo returned from school that afternoon and informed his parents that his sister had never shown up, an anxious Mr. Langmaid hurried around to the neighboring homes to see if Josie might be with one of her friends. Except for Bernard Gile, however, no one had seen her all day. Within an hour, word of her disappearance had spread throughout the community. Dozens of men began scouring the countryside. When darkness fell, the search continued by torchlight.

It was a farmer named Daniel Merrill who stumbled upon Josie’s savaged corpse while moving through a marshy patch of woods about eighty feet from the main road. The time was around 8:00 p.m. The body was “lying on its back with the right arm doubled under and the left crossed over the breast,” he later testified. “The right foot was drawn up. The clothing appeared to have been removed and thrown back, all saturated with blood. The breast was bare.” Her vulva had been cut away and carried off by her butcher, never to be found. Her head, cleanly severed, was nowhere to be seen.

It wasn’t until the following morning that another searcher, Horace Ayer, discovered Josie’s head, rolled in her blue cape and dumped in the woods about a quarter mile from where her body was found. A postmortem examination revealed that before hacking off her head with an axe, her killer had crushed her skull with a club, then stomped on her face for good measure, leaving a clear imprint of his boot heel on one cheek. So savage was the bludgeoning he inflicted that every bone in Josie’s left hand had been shattered when she tried to shield her head from the blows.