Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (40 page)

As he approached the body, which lay on its stomach, Tingely noticed signs of a violent struggle, including a torn and bloody man’s shirtsleeve lying nearby in the grass. Though young James Hewling had assumed, as he later testified, that the woman was “asleep or just drunk,” Tingely could tell, even before he reached her, that she was dead. It wasn’t until he knelt by the corpse, however, that he saw, to his horror, that she had been beheaded. Turning the body over, he found that her outer clothing had been ripped open and her corset torn off, exposing her breasts. The palm and fingers of her left hand had been sliced nearly to the bone. A large pool of blood soaked the ground beneath the stump of her mangled neck.

While Tingely continued inspecting the corpse, the deputy raced back for Sheriff Plummer, who arrived a short time later. Examining the crime scene, Plummer and his deputy discovered several sets of footprints. From these markings and other physical evidence—the scattered clothes, trampled ground, widely splattered blood—they deduced that the woman and a male companion “had walked side by side for a short distance when, for some reason, the woman had attempted to flee.” Overtaking her, the murderer had “choked her into silence and dragged her toward the bushy bank. She struggled desperately and he tore handfuls of clothing from her dress. He threw her to the ground and slid over the bank with her.” Drawing a knife, “he slashed at her throat.” Defensively, she clutched the blade with her left hand and it “laid her palm and fingers open to the bone. Her struggles were useless, and in a moment her life blood was pouring from a gaping wound in her throat.” Afterward, the killer had sawn through her neck below the fifth vertebra and carried off her head.

While the body was loaded onto a wagon and driven to a nearby undertaker’s establishment to be autopsied, a pair of Cincinnati detectives, Cal Crim and John McDermott, were assigned to the case. By the time they arrived at Lock’s orchard, however,
the site had been overrun by curiosity seekers who—driven by the perennial human craving for the kind of grisly souvenirs known nowadays as “murderabilia”—had effectively destroyed the crime scene. As one contemporary account described it:

The scene outside W. H. White’s undertaking parlor in Newport was equally frenzied. “All day long and up to a late hour at night, the place was besieged with people anxious to get a look at the remains of the unfortunate woman.” With Coroner Tingely and several other physicians in attendance, Dr. Robert Carothers of Newport conducted the postmortem examination, which revealed that the victim was carrying a fetus “of between four and five months’ gestation” that had clearly been alive when the victim was butchered. The fetus was removed and taken to a nearby pharmacy, where it was placed in alcohol for preservation. The stomach was also excised and turned over to Dr. W. H. Crane of Ohio Medical College, who was able to ascertain that the victim had ingested seventeen grains of cocaine shortly before her death. All the victim’s blood had gushed out through her open neck; not a single drop was found in her veins, arteries, or heart.

Following the autopsy, Carothers issued a statement that proved to be remarkably accurate. “I judge that it was a premeditated and cold-blooded murder,” he told reporters. “The girl, in my opinion, was from the country and comparatively innocent. She was brought to Cincinnati to submit to a criminal operation. Once here she was taken to Fort Thomas and murdered. Her head was taken away, horrible as it may seem, merely to prevent the identification of her body.”

News of the atrocity set off shock waves that reverberated throughout the nation—and beyond. “The awful deed struck horror to the hearts of the people, and they were worked up to a pitch that had never been witnessed,” wrote one observer. “The entire country was startled from center to circumference and aroused as it never had been before. Telephones and telegraph were called into service, and the finding of the headless body of a young and doubtless beautiful woman in a sequestered spot near Fort Thomas was flashed around the world.”

With criminal science still in a primitive stage (even the forensic use of fingerprints was still more than a decade away in the United States), detectives resorted to the only means at their disposal. Three “famous bloodhounds” named Jack, Wheeler, and Stonewall—responsible for the apprehension of more than twenty criminals then serving time in midwestern penitentiaries—were given a scent of the dead woman’s clothing, then brought to the murder scene by their owner, Arthur Carter of Seymour, Indiana. After following the trail to Covington reservoir, however, they lost the scent. Thinking that the missing head might have been tossed into the water, authorities had the reservoir drained at considerable expense. “But the head,” as one paper reported, “was not discovered.”

In the end, it was the victim’s shoes that broke the case open. In contrast to her handmade and nondescript clothing, the new black button-topped shoes were factory produced and carried the manufacturer’s marking: “Louis & Hays, Greencastle, Ind., 22–11, 62,458.” With assistance from a local dry-goods merchant named L. D. Poock, detectives were able to trace the footwear to their source and determine that the shoes had been purchased by a local girl named Pearl Bryan.

Born into one of “the oldest and best connected families in the state of Indiana,” twenty-two-year-old Pearl was the youngest of twelve children of Alexander S. Bryan, owner of a large and prosperous farm in the town of Greencastle. As the baby of the family, she had grown up “petted and feted”—the darling late-life child of doting parents who showered her with love and worldly goods. Despite her coddled upbringing, she had grown up to be entirely unspoiled, a vivacious young woman “of a lovable, affectionate disposition, liked by all.” Besieged by wealthy young men who “would have eagerly jumped at the opportunity to claim her as their wife,” she rebuffed all suitors—until, in the spring of 1895, she was introduced to a debonair young dental student named Scott Jackson.

Son of a navy commodore, the widely traveled Jackson was an affable, smooth-talking
charmer with a “most winsome countenance”—“dimples on his chin and cheeks, a childish smile on his lips, frank, beautiful, pale violet-blue eyes.” Women found him irresistible, and Pearl Bryan was no exception. From their initial meeting, wrote an early chronicler of the case, “it was love at first sight. She who had refused to listen to the wooing whispers of men in high rank and station in life by the scores, fell at once a victim to the darts from cupid’s shaft sent from Jackson’s lips.”

Pearl undoubtedly would have been less taken with the prepossessing dental student had she known of his unsavory secret history. Just a few years earlier, he and an accomplice had embezzled $32,000 from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company—an amount equal to more than $800,000 in today’s money. Jackson had avoided a long stretch in the penitentiary only by turning state’s evidence against his cohort. He also possessed a highly developed taste for debauchery, which he had freely indulged during his wide-flung travels. To those who knew the truth about Jackson, he was “a natural monster, a whited sepulcher, one of those unaccountable freaks of nature,” beneath whose “fine form and features” there lurked a diabolically cunning creature “absolutely incapable of any expression of remorse.” In the language of his time, he was a “very demon in human form.” In the clinical terms of ours, he was a classic criminal psychopath.

Smitten with his charms—his “honeyed words and protestations of love”—the virginal Pearl gave herself to the cold-blooded seducer. It wasn’t long before she discovered, to her horror, that she was pregnant. By then, Jackson, his “lustful desire” slaked, had abandoned her and moved to Cincinnati.

In a panic, she wrote to him, describing her desperate condition. He in turn suggested various medicinal concoctions that would produce a miscarriage—“recipes calculated to prevent the evil results of their indiscretion,” in the euphemistic language of the time. When those failed “to have the desired effect of reversing the laws of nature,” he directed her to come to Cincinnati, where he would arrange for an abortion. She left home on January 27, telling her parents that she was off to visit friends in Indianapolis. Her family had not heard from her since.

Nine days had elapsed without a word from Pearl when Detectives Crim and McDermott showed up at the Bryan farmhouse, carrying the bloodied clothes of the murder victim. Shown the hand-sewn garments, her parents immediately identified them as Pearl’s. Desperately clutching at the hope that their daughter might yet be alive, they “argued that she might have given her clothes to some else.” When the
detectives described some distinguishing features found on the body, including webbed toes and a small wart on one hand, her parents could no longer fend off the terrible truth. “Pearl, my poor Pearl!” sobbed her mother, burying her face in her hands.

In short order, Scott Jackson was arrested, along with his roommate and accomplice, Alonzo Walling. At first both men vehemently denied any knowledge of the crime. For days they were subjected to constant interrogation. In an effort to make them crack, they were taken to a local undertaking establishment and confronted with Pearl Bryan’s headless corpse, clothed in the white silk dress she had worn for her high school graduation and laid out in a satin-lined casket. Though neither culprit would ever make a wholehearted confession, the central facts of the murder eventually came to light.

C
ARRYING A PAIR
of satchels, one made of tan leather, the other of alligator skin, Pearl arrived in Cincinnati on Monday afternoon, January 27. She was met at the station by Jackson, who took her to a nearby women’s hostel, the Indiana House, and got her settled in a room. She spent the next few days in the company of Jackson and his roommate, Alonzo Walling, waiting anxiously for the promised procedure. By Thursday, she had grown so impatient with the protracted delay that she threatened to return home if Jackson did not immediately make good on his obligation. Assuring her that arrangements had been made for the following evening, Jackson told Pearl to meet him at a nearby saloon.

Both he and Walling were there when she showed up shortly before seven o’clock on Friday night. Seated at a secluded table in the rear of the saloon, Jackson, who had brought along a vial of cocaine he had purchased at a local pharmacy, managed to slip the drug into Pearl’s sarsaparilla soda during dinner. By the time they left the place, she was so groggy that she had to be half lifted into a cab by the two men.

Directing the driver to take them over the river and into Kentucky, Jackson had him stop at a remote spot just outside the wooden fence bounding James Lock’s farm. He and Walling then got Pearl out of the carriage, helped her over the fence, and led her deep into the apple orchard. Even in her drugged state, Pearl suddenly understood what was happening. Breaking away from the men, she tried to flee but was quickly overtaken by Jackson, who dragged her into some bushes and began slashing
away with a razor-edged dissecting knife he had brought along. In her frenzied effort to save herself, Pearl clutched at the blade, which sliced her fingers to the bone. Yanking her head back by the hair, Jackson opened her throat. She collapsed in the grass and bled out within seconds.

Jackson then knelt beside her and sawed off her head, which he wrapped in his overcoat, carried back to his boardinghouse room, and placed inside one of Pearl’s satchels. A few nights later, he carried the satchel to the Covington Suspension Bridge and tossed the head into the swirling current of the Ohio River.

S
COTT
J
ACKSON’S THREE-WEEK
trial began in late April 1896 and featured a number of sensational moments, including the display of a grotesque headless dummy dressed in Pearl Bryan’s blood-soaked clothing. Walling was tried separately a month later. Both men were found guilty and sentenced to death. On May 20, 1897, they were hanged together for what the newspapers touted as “The Crime of the Century.”

Like similar nineteenth-century homicides involving pregnant young women slain by their lovers, the savage killing of Pearl Bryan was promptly commemorated in a highly sentimentalized ballad. Scholar Anne B. Cohen has identified six different versions of the song. The most popular goes like this: