Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (37 page)

A
S A GENERAL RULE, CELEBRATED PSYCHO KILLERS ACHIEVE THEIR NOTORIETY BY
committing some form of multiple homicide: family annihilation, mass murder, serial slaughter. Occasionally, however, a killer comes along who earns widespread infamy by doing away with a single victim. Harry Hayward was one of these rarities. More unusual still is that Hayward himself did not do the actual killing. To his contemporaries, however, that fact only added to his dark mystique. In their eyes, he was a figure of unprecedented evil: “the most depraved, the most cold-blooded murderer that ever walked God’s footstool, the most bloodthirsty soul that ever usurped the human frame.”

A
T THE CORNER
of Thirteenth Street and Hennepin Avenue in the Loring Park neighborhood of downtown Minneapolis stands a handsome building known today as the Bellevue. A popular restaurant called Eli’s Bar and Grill occupies the ground floor, along with another trendy eatery, the Espresso Royale. The four stories above consist of airy condos whose prices extend into the quarter-million-dollar range. Real estate ads tout the elegant features of these apartments: the high ceilings, the hardwood floors, the splendid fireplaces and spectacular skyline views. Potential buyers are also informed
that the Bellevue itself is a “historic building,” though the precise details of its history are rarely given—an understandable omission since its significance derives largely from its connection to one of the city’s most sensational murder cases.

Built in 1891 as a residential hotel, the Bellevue—or the Ozark Flats, as it was originally called—was owned and managed by a local real estate magnate, William W. Hayward, who resided in the building with his family. Among the other early occupants was a woman named Catherine Ging—Kitty to her friends—soon to achieve a kind of grim immortality as the subject of a popular murder ballad, “The Fatal Ride.”

Even in the age of the statuesque “Gibson girl,” when the ideal female physique was considerably fleshier than it is today, Kitty Ging—standing five feet seven inches tall and weighing 150 pounds—was regarded as a bit on the hefty side: “grand in figure,” as one chronicler gallantly puts it. Nor was she particularly beautiful: “passably good looking, though of a masculine type” is the way one contemporary describes her. Still, with her luxuriant black hair, striking gray eyes, bright smile, and vivacious manner, she had no trouble attracting male attention.

Harry Hayward

(
Minnesota Historical Society. Used by permission.
)

Born and raised in upstate New York, she had moved to Minneapolis in her early twenties—reportedly “to escape a persistent suitor”—and opened a dressmaking shop on Nicollett Avenue. A skilled seamstress and ambitious young businesswoman, she quickly attracted a wealthy clientele.
In 1893, she received a marriage proposal—along with a diamond ring—from a department store clerk named Frederick Reed. The engagement didn’t last, but the experience wasn’t a total loss for Kitty, since she got to keep the ring, which she wore upon her person at all times, tucked inside the bodice of her dress in “a little chamois bag.” There was nothing sentimental about this gesture. Rather, it reflected a fundamental fact about Kitty Ging’s character: money was exceptionally dear to her heart, and she was not overly particular about the way she obtained it.

In keeping with the precept of speaking no ill of the dead, most of Kitty Ging’s contemporaries insisted that she was a person of spotless virtue. Still, even her staunchest defenders had to admit that she led a somewhat free and easy life for a young unmarried woman in late Victorian America. Moralists of the day read her tragic fate as a cautionary tale: “a terrible warning to the class of young womanhood which delights in nightly carriage rides with male companions and private party suppers in places where wine and cigarettes can be made part of the bill of fare.” Indeed, according to the earliest chronicler of the Ging murder, a journalist named Oscar F. G. Day, on the very afternoon of Kitty’s death she remarked to a male companion that she had recently come into a substantial sum of money and intended to use it “to paint the town red.” In view of subsequent events, the statement was seen as grimly prophetic.

“Alas poor girl,” writes Day, “how little did she know that on that very night she would ‘paint the town red,’ not in the common acceptance of the term, but with her very life blood!”

A
T AROUND HALF
past eight on the clear, moonlit evening of Monday, December 3, 1894, a young railway employee named William Erhardt, on his way home from work, alighted at a streetcar stop on the outskirts of the city and proceeded by foot along a lonely stretch of road. Almost immediately, he heard the sound of fast-approaching hooves. He stepped to one side just as a buggy sped past, drawn by a galloping horse. With the leather top of the buggy raised, Erhardt couldn’t see the driver. Glancing after the rig as it vanished from sight, Erhardt wondered “why a man should be driving at such a reckless pace.” Then, dismissing the matter from his mind, he continued on his way.

He hadn’t gone far when, as he later testified, he nearly stepped on a large object
lying in the middle of the road. Peering closer, he saw that it was the body of a woman. She was sprawled on her side, her limbs entangled in a carriage robe, her head in a pool of still-steaming blood.

Instantly thinking of the galloping horse, he assumed that she was the victim of a runaway accident, thrown from the buggy when the driver lost control. Dashing to the nearest telephone, he notified a physician named William Russell, who, arriving a half hour later, pronounced the woman dead.

The corpse was transported to the Hennepin County morgue and laid out, fully clothed, on a marble slab. She was clearly a young woman “of the better class,” as revealed by her stylish outfit: blue woolen skirt, striped shirtwaist, fine sealskin jacket, and jaunty sailor’s hat. Stripping off her garments, morgue keeper John W. Walsh found a laundry mark on an item of her underclothing. It consisted of a single word: “Ging.”

It was nearly 11:00 p.m. when coroner Willis P. Spring arrived at the morgue to examine the corpse. It didn’t take him long to discover that her death was no accident. There was a “round, ragged wound” behind her right ear and her left eye protruded from the socket. When Spring pushed the eyeball back into place, he felt a small hard object. Even before he pulled it out with his fingers, he could tell it was a bullet.

A
T ROUGHLY THE
same time that the body of the murdered woman was on its way to the morgue, Henry Gilbert, foreman of the Palace livery stable in downtown Minneapolis, heard a horse enter the barn. Crossing the floor to meet it, he saw that it was a bay mare named Lucy, hitched to a buggy that had been rented out earlier that evening. No one was inside the buggy.

After unhitching the horse and sending it to its stall, Gilbert peered into the buggy and noticed something peculiar on the center of the cloth seat cushion. In the dim light of the stable, he thought it was a scarf. Leaning in for a closer look, he was startled to see that it was “a pool of clotted blood, a half-inch thick and as large as a sheet of legal paper.” Pulling the buggy closer to a lantern that hung from the wall, he saw that there were splashes of blood everywhere—“on the back cushion, on the buggy bottom, on one of the bows that supported the top.”

The police were summoned, the stable owners notified. A check of the register
quickly disclosed the name of the person who had rented the rig for the evening: Catherine Ging of the Ozark Flats.

R
EPAIRING TO THE
Ozark Flats, police broke the bad news to Kitty’s next of kin, her seventeen-year-old niece, Mary Louise Ireland, who shared her rooms and helped with her dressmaking business. “Frantic with grief,” Mary was in no condition to talk. The police had given up hope of gleaning any useful information from her when another resident of the building—an intimate acquaintance of the murder victim—arrived: Harry Hayward.

The youngest child of the building’s owner, twenty-nine-year-old Harry conformed to a familiar type: the dissipated, ne’er-do-well son of a powerful, prominent father. Broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and imposingly tall, he was a fine figure of young manhood—“a man to be looked at twice when met,” in the words of one contemporary. A dandy in dress, he sported a neatly trimmed blond moustache and—despite prematurely thinning hair, horsey teeth, and an ocular tic that caused his right eye “to roll upwards at intervals”—was considered dashingly handsome. He had smooth, polished manners and was welcomed in that “level of society acquainted with evening dress.”

He was also, as he himself would later confess, a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. Though he enjoyed mingling with Minneapolis’ social elite, most of his time was spent in the company of petty crooks, cardsharps, and the habitués of billiard halls. He had taken up gambling at an early age and—despite his father’s efforts to involve him in the real estate business—had never done an honest day’s work in his life. Every cent that came his way was squandered at the faro table. Like other addicts, he was constantly on the lookout for the funds to support his habit. As the world was soon to learn, one major source was Kitty Ging.

When informed of Kitty’s death, Harry had an odd response. “Goddamn it,” he cried. “My money is gone to hell! What a fool I’ve been!” Asked to elaborate on this “strange exclamation,” he explained that he had loaned Miss Ging nearly $10,000 to expand her millinery business and was now afraid that he would never see the money. When pressed for more details about their financial dealings, Harry admitted that, as security for the loan, Kitty had taken out two life insurance policies of $5,000 each—one from the New York Life Insurance Company, one from Traveler’s Accident Insurance Company—and assigned them to him.

From the moment it broke on the follow morning, the story of Kitty Ging’s murder—“the most wonderful tragedy of modern times,” as one journalist called it—became a newspaper sensation, dominating the headlines for months. Several suspects were quickly identified: an unemployed man named Constant J. Warnecke, who “was known to have boarded at the same house with the murdered woman and to have known her intimately”; Kitty’s former fiancé, the dry-goods clerk Frederick Reed, whose diamond ring she still carried in her corset; a “pretty, petite brunette” named Lillian Allen, said to have been a rival for Reed’s affection; Ed Conway, a rakish young man who lived in the Ozark Flats; and a traveling salesman named Harvey Axelrod, whose affair with Kitty had come to an acrimonious end when she learned that he was married. Tracked down by police, all had no trouble proving their innocence.

As the beneficiary of Kitty’s two life insurance policies—both of which had been written only ten days before her death—Harry himself was an obvious suspect. But he too had a seemingly airtight alibi. At the time of the murder, he was at the Grand Opera House, enjoying Charles Hale Hoyt’s popular musical comedy A Trip to Chinatown in the company of Miss Mabel Bartelson, daughter of a prominent attorney.

By then, the mayor of Minneapolis, William Henry Eustis, had become actively involved in the investigation. Summoning Harry to his office, Eustis, in the company of several police detectives, questioned Harry closely about his relationship with the murder victim.

The suave young man replied without the slightest hesitation. He had met and befriended Kitty Ging when she became his neighbor in the Ozark Flats the previous January. Soon he was regaling her with tales of his gambling prowess. Infatuated with the debonair young man—and tempted by the prospect of easy money—she had bankrolled his ventures at the gaming tables to the tune of several thousand dollars. After Harry lost a sizable sum of her money playing faro in Chicago, however, she had ceased to stake him.

Increasingly suspicious of Harry—and frustrated by his imperturbable manner—authorities resolved on a scheme to rattle his composure. Conveying him to the morgue, they confronted him with the disfigured corpse of Kitty Ging, stretched out upon the marble slab. If they hoped that he would betray his guilt by quailing at the ghastly sight, they were disappointed. Like other psychopaths, whose bizarre emotional makeup renders them immune to anxiety, Harry had the ability to remain utterly calm and unruffled under the most nerve-racking circumstances.

Gazing down at the corpse, he shook his head sadly and said: “Poor girl—poor dead girl. If you could only speak now, you could tell us who he was.”

“Not a particle of color left his face,” Day reports. “Every eye was upon him, every nerve was strained to catch the slightest quiver of his muscular frame, the slightest pallor of his face. Yet he stood the test. Not one of the party could say that the sight of the poor murdered girl caused him a moment of guilt and remorse.” Assuming that their suspicions were misplaced, they let him go.

The following morning, December 5—two days after Kitty Ging’s death—a funeral service was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Harry brought a large floral tribute to place on the casket and announced his intention to accompany the remains back to Kitty’s hometown of Auburn, New York, where she would be laid to rest in the State Street Cemetery.