Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (33 page)

O
NE OF THE MOST APPALLING
A
MERICAN CRIMES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS
the 1965 murder of sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens, tortured to death by a bunch of neighborhood kids under the depraved supervision of her paid caretaker, Gertrude Baniszewski. A hatchet-faced, thirty-six-year-old divorcée and mother of seven whose grim, brutalized existence had transformed her into a premature crone, Baniszewski inhabited a run-down clapboard house in a poor section of Indianapolis. With her meager income from assorted odd jobs—ironing, babysitting, hawking soda pop at the local speedway—she and her kids subsisted on a diet of canned soup, warmed on a hot plate (the house had no stove). Evidently the family took turns eating, since—according to reliable reports—there were only three spoons in the household.

In the summer of 1965, a neighbor named Lester Likens, who barely knew Baniszewski and never bothered to inspect her home, offered her twenty dollars a week to board his teenage daughter Sylvia and her younger, polio-crippled sister, Jenny, while he and his wife hit the road with a traveling carnival. Within weeks, Baniszewski began subjecting Sylvia to ever-intensifying abuse, progressing from slaps to punches to savage thrashings with a heavy leather belt, a broom handle, and a wooden paddle. In her spiraling sadism, she recruited her own children along with a group of
their young friends to participate in the awful violation of the pretty teenager until, as Time magazine reported, “torturing Sylvia became a neighborhood sport.” Over the next few months, Sylvia was beaten, starved, burned, and compelled to eat her own feces and to sexually debase herself before an audience of her juvenile tormentors. The climax occurred when Baniszewski heated up a needle and, with the assistance of several neighborhood boys, branded Sylvia’s shrunken belly with the words, “I’m a prostitute and proud of it.” Death, when it finally came to the victim, was undoubtedly a mercy.

T
HOUGH
B
ANISZEWSKI
(who was paroled in 1985 after serving twenty years of a life sentence and died of lung cancer later that year) was a uniquely monstrous figure, her crime was not entirely without precedent. A century earlier, America was shocked by a strikingly similar case: a paid female caretaker who, with the aid of her own son, savagely abused and murdered a young girl in her charge.

The victim in this case was eight-year-old Alice Meaker of Charlotte, Vermont, whose brief, tragic life was blighted from the very start. She had barely turned three when her father died in 1873, leaving his family—his third wife, Mary, and their two children, Alice and Henry—in abject poverty. Unable to maintain the little ones, Mary placed them in the town poor farm, where, according to later reports, the young girl was subjected to sexual abuse.

Relief from this dire situation seemed to arrive in 1879 when Alice’s uncle, Horace Meaker of Duxbury, was offered $400 by town officials to take Alice and Henry into his household and off the public dole. The sum was a powerful inducement to the fifty-year-old Horace, a perpetually down-at-the-heels farmer who had spent his adulthood dragging his family around the state in a vain struggle to make a go of it. Contemporary accounts describe him as “a man of good character.” In light of later events, this seems like a generous assessment. At the very least, he was guilty of turning a totally blind eye to the dreadful doings of his wife, Emeline.

Married to Horace since she was eighteen, forty-five-year-old Emeline was (according to newspapers of the time) a “coarse, brutal, domineering woman,” a “perfect virago,” a “sullen, morose, repulsive-looking creature.” To be sure, these characterizations were deeply colored by the horror provoked by her crime. Still, there is little doubt that, as with Gertrude Banizsewski, Emeline’s grim, hardscrabble life had left
her deeply embittered and seething with suppressed rage—“malignant passions” (in the words of one contemporary) that would vent themselves against her helpless niece.

The abuse started shortly after Alice came to live with the Meakers. The “timid, shrinking” girl was treated like a household slave, forced “to do far more drudgery than her slender strength was equal to,” as one newspaper reported. At the slightest provocation—a whimper of complaint or a task not performed to her guardian’s satisfaction—Emeline would subject the child to a savage whipping with a broom or heavy stick. Before long, the hateful woman required no excuse at all. Calling the eight-year-old “a little bitch,” she would strip the child naked and “beat her without cause until she bled.”

Though Emeline herself suffered severe hearing problems and was literally deaf to her little niece’s anguished cries, the same could not be said of the neighbors, some of whom later testified that they “could hear the child’s screams half a mile away.” Their reluctance to intervene in any way would itself become a public scandal, anticipating the outrage provoked by the Kitty Genovese murder a century later. “The Duxbury people who allowed the Meaker woman to torture, unchecked, the little waif placed in her care,” editorialized one Vermont daily, “were guilty of culpable neglect, and must take a share of the blame as well as of the disgrace which this horrible crime has brought upon their community.”

W
ITHIN THAT SAME
community, stories would eventually circulate that Alice was murdered to prevent her from revealing a scandalous secret: that Emeline Meaker and her twenty-five-year-old son, Almon, were “guilty of the revolting crime of living in an incestuous relationship.… Having observed that the two occupied the bedroom while Horace slept upstairs, Alice declared that she would tell, and this made the little girl the victim of terrible abuse, till she was finally killed.” However deliciously titillating, this rumor probably says less about the Meakers than about prurient fantasies of their neighbors, who—in the wake of what was generally regarded as the most heinous murder in Vermont history—were ready to imagine the worst about the perpetrators.

Almon himself, described in one newspaper as “a harmless appearing young man not over bright,” offered a very different motive. Alice, he explained, “wasn’t a very
good girl; no one liked her, and she was hard to get along with.” Persuaded by his mother that Alice “would be better off if she were dead,” he consented to assist in her murder.

At first, Emeline proposed that her son “take Alice out and abandon her to starve on a remote mountain.” When he rejected that idea as overly risky, she came up with a more straightforward plan.

On Friday evening, April 23, 1880—less than a year after Alice and her brother came to live with the Meakers—Almon, acting on his mother’s orders, purchased fifteen grains of strychnine at a local drugstore, telling the proprietor that he “wanted to kill some rats in the buttery.” He then proceeded to a nearby livery stable, where he hired a horse and a buggy. Back home, he and his mother stole into the sleeping girl’s bedroom, slipped a sack over her head, bundled her into the carriage, and drove northward to a remote hilltop, where—after mixing the poison with some sugar-sweetened water—they forced the girl to drink the lethal potion from her own favorite crockery mug, a gift from her long-dead mother inscribed with the words “Remember Me.”

It took about twenty minutes for the strychnine to work. As the little girl convulsed and cried out for her mother, Emeline clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle the noise. When Alice stopped breathing, Almon drove the buggy to a spot outside Stowe, where he buried her in a swampy thicket about forty-five feet off the road, stomping the body down into the muck and covering it with some brush. He then drove the rig back to the livery stable, dropping off his mother along the way.

I
T DIDN’T TAKE
long for neighbors to notice that Alice was gone. When asked about the girl’s disappearance, Emeline claimed that the “damned critter” had run away in the middle of the night. Her tone made it clear that, as far as she was concerned, it was a case of good riddance to bad rubbish. For whatever reason, however (sheer stupidity seems the likeliest explanation), Emeline hadn’t bothered to share her cover story with Almon, who not only offered a completely contradictory account—that he had dropped Alice off at a friend’s house in a nearby town and hadn’t seen her since—but kept changing the details. (In another version, he “had driven Alice to Richmond, Vermont, and given her $6.50 for train fare to Montreal.”)

Their suspicions aroused, a few of the neighbors finally conveyed their concerns
to town officials. On Monday, April 26, a deputy sheriff named Frank Atherton showed up at the Meaker farm and subjected the suspects to an intense grilling. Before long, the weak-willed Almon had cracked and spilled out the awful truth. Atherton immediately ordered Almon to show him the body. Climbing into the deputy’s buggy, the pair drove out to the swampy woods, where (as Vermont historian John Stark Bellamy reconstructs the scene):

At first, the murderous pair—guilty of what the newspapers immediately branded “one of the most diabolical and revolting murders known in history or fiction”—displayed a touching loyalty to each other. Emeline initially insisted that “Almon is innocent, I am the guilty one.” For his part, Almon altered his original story and now claimed that “he and he alone had planned and committed the murder.”

By the time the case came to trial in November 1880, Emeline’s protectively maternal impulse had been replaced by craven self-interest. Proclaiming her innocence, she placed the entire blame on Almon. The evidence against her, however—including the testimony of fifty-three witnesses who described in chilling detail her monstrous mistreatment of Alice—was overwhelming. At the end of the seven-day proceedings, the jury needed less than two hours to arrive at a decision. Unable to hear the foreman, Emeline broke into hysterical shrieks when her lawyer wrote out the verdict on a slip of paper—“guilty of murder in the first degree”—and showed it to her.

In the meantime, Almon—who had pleaded guilty at the commencement of the trial and was sentenced to hang along with his mother—underwent an eventual
change of heart. Four months before the scheduled execution, he recanted his confession and—while admitting his part in the murder—“insisted it was all his mother’s idea.” His desperate, last-minute bid to save his own skin succeeded, and his sentence was commuted to life in prison. As for his mother, she would go to her death bitterly complaining that “his lies had sent her to the gallows.”

T
HOUGH
V
ERMONT HAD
never executed a female before, no outcry was raised over Emeline’s death sentence. Even opponents of capital punishment failed to rally on her behalf, such was the abhorrence provoked by her crime. “It is indeed an awful thing to hang a woman,” editorialized the Burlington Free Press, “but still more awful is the spectacle of a woman devoid of the natural instincts and affections of her sex.” The world “would breathe freer with the execution,” said the paper, adding the devout wish that future generations would never again see the like of “such a monster.”

Locked up in the state prison at Windsor while her appeals made their long and ultimately futile way through the courts, Emeline passed her time feigning madness,
attacking attendants, and in general (as one paper reported), acting “like a wild beast.” As her execution date approached, however, she quieted down, spending “much of the time calmly knitting in her cell,” as the
New York Times
reported.

On the eve of her execution, she grudgingly agreed to a visit from Almon. At the end of the hour, she even allowed him a goodbye kiss, though she made it clear that she still held him responsible for her predicament. The following morning—after a breakfast of beefsteak, potatoes, bread and butter, mince pie, and coffee—she asked to see the gallows. “Inspecting it,” writes author Kelly Segrave, “she walked up the stairs, studied the mechanism, and had the working of the drop explained to her by the sheriff.” “Why, it’s not half as bad as I thought,” she remarked as she was led back to her cell.