Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (39 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
To those who witnessed it, the outburst gave weight to an opinion shared by a number of medical experts: that Harry Hayward, for all his charm and intelligence, was “actually insane.”
A
T NO POINT
during his year in jail did Harry display the slightest remorse. Nor would he admit to any role in Kitty Ging’s murder. It wasn’t until the evening of December 9, 1895—after his appeal had been denied, the governor had refused to grant clemency, and a bill to abolish the death penalty in Minnesota had been voted down by the state legislature—that Harry, with nothing to lose and death only twenty-six hours away, agreed to open up.
His confession—made to his cousin Edward Goodsell and transcribed by a court stenographer—took place over three lengthy sessions lasting a total of twelve hours. In it, Harry portrayed himself as a criminal mastermind, “coursing the byways of this world and twisting its supine inhabitants to the requirements of his will.” Most shocking was his claim that, in the course of his wide-ranging travels as an itinerant gambler, he had murdered three people besides Kitty Ging.
The first was a pretty twenty-year-old “sporting girl” he had met in Pasadena. Luring her to a remote spot in the Sierra Madre, he had shot her in the back of the head, buried her in the woods, and made off with the $700 she carried in her purse. Sometime later, on the opposite coast, he had shot a “consumptive” in Long Branch, New Jersey, and taken $2,000 from the man before disposing of the corpse.
His most brutal crime, however, was the slaying of a “Chinaman” in a New York City gambling joint on Mulberry Street. Getting into an altercation over a card game, Harry “knocked the Chinaman down and kicked him in the stomach.” He then picked up a chair and jabbed the pointed end of one wooden leg into the man’s eye. Then, while the man “was down and howling,” Harry sat down on the chair. “His skull was kind of thin,” Harry related with a chuckle, “and I heard the chair leg smash down through his skull.”
He admitted that, before committing his first murder, it had “always been in my head to kill a person,” and that the impulse to “do away” with different victims had “passed through my mind dozens and dozens of times.” Describing a “good, nice girl” he had briefly wooed some years earlier, Harry claimed an affinity with the infamous San Francisco sex killer Theodore Durrant. “I can tell exactly how he felt,” he told Goodsell. “He did it with pleasure.” Taking the trusting girl out for a buggy ride one evening, Harry “could hardly keep from choking her to death. I would have just liked to. She don’t know how close she came to kicking the bucket.”
To the horrified Goodsell, it seemed clear that his cousin Harry—a man capable of committing the most awful atrocities without the slightest twinge of conscience or
remorse—was no “ordinary assassin” but a being “possessed of a frightful homicidal mania,” a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” character “totally devoid of all moral sensibility”: in short, what a later age would call a serial killer.
Throughout the confession, Harry does in fact display many of the traits that we now know are typical of serial murderers: overweening narcissism, juvenile sadism (“in early life,” we are told, “he was recognized by his school mates for his brutal instincts, delighting in the torture of domestic animals”), pyromania, a total lack of empathy for his fellow human beings. Like other serial killers, he experienced his “murderous impulse” as a kind of autonomous second self that would suddenly “come over him.” Interestingly, he also seems to have suffered from convulsions as an adolescent, possibly as the result of a head injury—a factor found in the background of many serial killers.
To be sure, it is hard to know how much credence to give to Harry’s claims of multiple murder. Like all psychopaths, he was an inveterate liar, constitutionally incapable of telling the truth. Typical of his breed, he also took a perverse pride in his criminal celebrity. It is possible that, in his eagerness to ensure a place in the pantheon of infamy, he grossly exaggerated his crimes. Goodsell himself refers to Harry’s desire “to go down in history as the ‘Napoleon of crime.’ ”
And then there was the matter of money. As Harry understood, the more lurid the confession, the more copies it would sell. Since the profits would go to Goodsell, his “favored cousin,” Harry was only too happy to give the public what it wanted. Certainly his own older brother, Dr. Thaddeus Hayward, regarded the confession as a hoax. “Harry regarded his whole life as a big joke, and he decided to top the climax with a joke,” Thaddeus told reporters. “I place but little faith in the confession. He intimated to me regarding his confession that it was his intention to give the public their fill of blood and thunder.”
In the end, it is impossible to know whether Harry Hayward killed one victim or (as he claimed) four. All that can be said with certainty is that, as a case of criminal psychopathology—“moral insanity,” in the terms of his contemporaries—Harry Hayward was, as Goodsell and others saw it, one of the most remarkable specimens of his age.
A
FTER COMPLETING HIS
confession late on Tuesday evening, December 10, Harry summoned his brother, Adry, again, apologized for his previous outburst, shook his hand, and bid him farewell. He then sat down for a hearty supper. A few hours later, nattily
dressed in a cutaway coat, pinstripe trousers, turndown collar, and white necktie, he was escorted to the gallows, which—at his request—had been painted a holiday red.
As he ambled to the scaffold, he bid the spectators a cheerful “good evening” and asked “for three cheers for himself.” Ascending the stairs with a firm step, he stood upon the drop and proceeded to crack so many jokes about his imminent death that the spectators, according to one eyewitness, “looked upon him almost as if he were a stage performer who would soon take his bow, receive his modicum of applause, and retire.” It wasn’t until the sheriff reprimanded him for his undignified behavior and urged him “to die like a man” that Harry brought his flippant monologue to a close.
Very swiftly, his arms and legs were pinioned, and the noose was thrown around his neck. “Keep up your courage boys,” Harry said with a sneer. “Pull her tight. I stand pat.”
With that, the trap was sprung. The noose, however, had not been adjusted correctly. The fall did not break Harry’s neck. Thrashing in midair, he slowly strangled, taking fifteen long minutes to die.
A
MONG THE WITNESSES
gathered at the foot of the scaffold were two enterprising Minneapolis businessmen, H. Benedict and T. C. Hough, who—with the help of some judicious bribes—had smuggled an early phonograph machine into the jail and managed to record Harry’s last words on a wax cylinder. Within days of the execution, copies of this macabre souvenir were being marketed to the public.
As for Claus Blixt, he pleaded guilty at a separate trial and was sentenced to life in prison. He died behind bars in August 1925 at the age of seventy-two, having reportedly descended into total insanity.
Like so many other sensational homicides of the past, the murder of Kitty Ging—“Minnesota’s best-known, carefully planned crime,” as historian Walter N. Trennery calls it—was commemorated in a widely distributed ballad. Anonymously written and variously known as “The Harry Hayward Song” and “The Fatal Ride,” the lyrics go like this:
Minneapolis was excited, and for many miles around,
For a terrible crime committed just a mile or so from town.
It was on a cold and winter’s eve, the moon had passed away,
The road was dark and lonely when found dead where she lay.
The stars were shining brightly and the moon had passed away,
The roads were dark and lonely where her form had turned to clay.
Then tell the tale of a criminal, Kit was his promised bride,
Just another sin to answer for, just another fatal ride.
When for pleasure she went riding, little did she know her fate,
That was to take place on that lonely night on the road near Calhoun Lake;
She was shot while in the buggy, and beaten (’Tis true to speak!)
Until all of life had vanished—then was cast into the street.
He was at heart a criminal and a coward of a man!
And so he sought another to execute his plan.
The bargain it was struck, the villain did reply,
“Tonight she takes that fatal ride—Yes, she will have to die!”
Oh, how could he have done that deed, so terrible to do?
Or how could he have killed a girl with a heart so pure and true?
It was a cold and bloody plot—likewise a terrible sin,
To take a life so kind and true as she had been to him.
Published in 1894, George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby tells the tragic story of a lovely young artist’s model, Trilby O’Ferral, who falls under the sway of a brilliant musician with sinister hypnotic powers. Though completely tone-deaf, Trilby is transformed through the evil genius of her mentor into a world-famous soprano, only to find her life fatally entwined with his. The book not only became an international sensation but, as historian Judith Pintar notes, “set off a marketing frenzy, during which the heroine’s name was bestowed upon a hat, several shoe designs, candy, toothpaste, soap, a brand of sausage, and even a town in Florida. Trilby’s face appeared on dolls, fans, writing paper, puzzles, and there were ice cream bars made in the shape of her feet.” Though the Trilby fad eventually faded, the book left a lasting mark on the English language. The villain’s name immediately became a synonym “for one who exercises a controlling or mesmeric influence on another, frequently for some sinister purpose”: Svengali.
At the time of Harry Hayward’s trial—just a year after Trilby was published—certain sensationalistic newspapers began referring to him as the “Minneapolis Svengali.” The reason was the supposed mesmeric influence he had exerted over his victims. According to widely circulated reports, it was Harry’s irresistible hypnotic power that had caused Kitty Ging to conspire in the plot that led to her murder and compelled Claus Blixt to carry out the “desperate deed.” Even Adry was quoted as saying that he had refrained from alerting police to his brother’s nefarious plan “partly from fear of Harry and partly as a result of the hypnotic influence he held over me.” Needless to say, there was not a shred of truth to these wild stories, though Harry himself, always eager to enhance his Mephistophelian image, did nothing to discourage them.
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Sources: The Ging Murder and the Great Hayward Trial. The Official Stenographic Report Containing Every Word of the Wonderful Trial from Its Opening to Sentence of Death; the Rulings of the Court; Speeches of Frank M. Nye [and Others] the Court’s Charge, etc. Supplemented by a Dramatic Story of the Great Crime by Oscar F. G. Day (Minneapolis: Minnesota Tribune Company, 1895); Walter N. Trennery, Murder in Minnesota: A Collection of True Cases (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1985); Stewart H. Holbrook, Murder Out Yonder: An Informal Study of Certain Classic Crimes in Back-Country America (New York: Macmillan, 1941); Olive Wooley Burt, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958); Tim Brooks, “The Last Words of Harry Hayward (A True Record Mystery),” Antique Phonograph Monthly 1, no. 6 (June-July 1973): 1–8.
]
WHO SLAUGHTERED POOR PEARL BRYAN
A
PPLE TREES HAVE BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH EVIL SINCE THE PRIMAL SERPENT
persuaded Eve to sample the forbidden fruit. In more recent times, orchards have been the locale of various heinous happenings. In 1873, for example, the killer clan known as the “Bloody Benders”—a family of frontier serial murderers who set up a crude roadside inn in Kansas where unwary travelers were slaughtered, then stripped of their possessions—used their newly sown apple orchard as a makeshift cemetery. A hundred years later, the California serial sex killer Juan Corona also planted his many victims in local orchards (albeit peach, not apple). And one of the most sensational murder mysteries of the twentieth century had its start in an orchard: the double slaying of the married Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall and his choir-girl mistress, Mrs. Eleanor Mills, whose savaged corpses were found side by side in a New Jersey crabapple grove on a September morning in 1922, igniting a case that transfixed Jazz Age America.
Though it has long since faded into obscurity, one of the grisliest and most highly publicized American murders of the late nineteenth century also came to light in an apple orchard. Early on the morning of Saturday, February 1, 1896, sixteen-year-old James Hewling—a hired hand for a farmer named James Lock, owner of a sizable spread near Fort Thomas, Kentucky—was cutting across his employer’s property
when he spotted a woman’s body sprawled in the grass beneath some apple trees. The young man was not especially alarmed. After a night on the town, carousing soldiers sometimes brought their doxies into the fields for a tumble, and on more than one occasion Hewling had come upon a drunken female sleeping off her debauch. Even so, he made sure to notify his boss upon arriving at the farmhouse. Lock immediately conveyed the information to Sheriff Jule Plummer, who dispatched one of his deputies to the scene. County coroner Robert Tingely, who was in the sheriff’s office at the time, thought it best to tag along.