Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (44 page)

Sometime later, at approximately 8:00 p.m., Alec Comeaux—a trapper who lived in a shack on the shore of Lake Poularde not far from what the newspapers invariably identified as the “colored schoolhouse”—heard two gunshots echoing across the water. He would later testify that they occurred “about half a second apart” and that they were unmistakably made by a shotgun.

Q
UESTIONED BY
C
HIEF
Blakeman on the night her husband turned up dead, Ada began by insisting that the corpse couldn’t possibly be Jim’s. True, she hadn’t seen him for a week. She wasn’t in the least bit worried, however, since “he was in the habit of leaving home every now and then without saying a word to anybody. He would go to Lafayette, Lake Charles, and over to Texas and stay there for a few days and then come back.” She was “sure he would return alive and well.”

Under intense questioning by Blakeman, Ada’s defenses began to crumble until she had “proceeded from absolute denial” to a qualified confession that underwent several significant revisions in the course of the lengthy interrogation. Ultimately, she admitted that she had sent the note to Dreher telling him that she and Jim would be out “riding on the lake tonight.” She insisted, however, that she was merely arranging a kind of peace parley on neutral territory—trying to get the two men to have a civilized talk and “fix this up friendly,” as she put it.

On the night of the murder, she and Jim “paddled out the old shell road. We had gone about fifty feet on our way back when another boat approached.” Seated inside were Dreher and Jim Beadle. “The other boat came up about four feet. The doctor said, ‘Is that you, Jim?’ My husband said, ‘Yes, who is that?’ The doctor said, ‘This is me—Doc. Your wife told me to meet you here and we would be friends again.’ ‘Friends, hell,’ my husband said, ‘you’ve got that damned Beadle with you,’ and fired a shot. Two shots came from the other boat and my husband fell dead. Jim Beadle, I judged, fired them. In my excitement, I just turned my boat around and came on back and never said a word about it to anyone.” The next morning, when her children inquired as to their father’s whereabouts, she told them that he had “rushed out
of town after a violent quarrel” but would return home in a few days, after he had cooled off.

A
FTER LOCKNG
A
DA
up in the local jail, officers proceeded to the home of Dr. Dreher, who met them with a combination of anguish and relief.

“I have been expecting you for a week,” he said when presented with the arrest warrant they carried. “I knew you would come and get me. This is hell. I have been in hell. Oh, why didn’t I do what I started out to do?—shoot my head off. I waited too long.”

Leading the sheriff out of earshot of his stunned wife and children, Dreher spilled out the story he would stick to until the end. Jim LeBoeuf, he claimed, had threatened his life “so often that I have been in fear at all times. I have kept my home in darkness for fear he would take a shot at me through the windows at night.”

After receiving Ada’s note a week earlier, he had gone and “told Jim Beadle that LeBoeuf meant to kill me, and Jim Beadle said to me, ‘You bring that son of a bitch out somewhere and I will put him away where he will never bother you or anyone else so long as you live.’

“I did not kill Jim LeBoeuf,” Dreher insisted. “Jim Beadle killed him. But he did it all for me, and I am just as guilty as he is.”

J
IM
B
EADLE WAS
the last of the trio to be picked up that night. In stark contrast to Dreher, who had broken down at his first sight of the lawmen, Beadle maintained a stoic silence, steadfastly denying any knowledge of the brutal affair. Taken to the jail for further questioning, he was brought face-to-face with the physician, who advised him that the “jig was up” and that he “might as well tell the whole thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Beadle blandly replied. In a nation that equates true manhood with reticence, Beadle would win many admirers, who saw him as an epitome of the “strong, silent” workingman, unshakably loyal to his more privileged benefactor. In the end, however, that loyalty would prove to have its definite limits.

I
N AN AGE
that couldn’t get enough of tabloid-ready sex and murder scandals, the press had a field day with the story. For a full month, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
plastered its front pages with blaring headlines on the case, proclaiming it “one of the most brutal crimes in Louisiana history” and the South’s very “own Snyder-Gray love murder.” Reporters scrambled to come up with lurid nicknames for Ada, labeling her “Louisiana’s love pirate,” “the bucolic Lorelei,” “the small-town Cleopatra,” “the automobile-riding vampire,” and “the siren of the swamps.” The public was whipped into a state of such frenzied excitement that within two weeks of the arrests, a seven-verse song about the murder began making the rounds. Catchily titled “Boat Riding Mamma, Don’t You Try to Angle-Iron Me,” its chorus went like this: “Sweet piroguing mamma, don’t you/Angle iron me.”

Local residents were “almost giddy” at the prospect of the trial, widely expected to be the most sensational criminal proceedings in the history of the state, an event that, as the Times-Picayune put it, would rival “the Snyder-Gray case in the public interest” and draw national attention to the sleepy town of Franklin, site of the county courthouse. By the time the trial began on July 24, 1927, every hotel room was “booked to overflowing and restaurants were geared for the onslaught” of out-of-town visitors. Though the courtroom could accommodate no more than three hundred spectators, town officials predicted that at least five thousand curiosity seekers would descend on the town—a number exceeding the entire population of Franklin.

In the event, the twelve-day trial turned out to be something of a bust, devoid of the high drama that had made both the Hall-Mills and Snyder-Gray cases such media sensations. For all its lurid potential, the case—so one reporter groused—devolved into a “drab, dull, and commonplace affair.”

The biggest bombshell was dropped by Jim Beadle, who, in a bid to save his own skin, dictated a confession that was read to the jury. In it, he placed all the blame on Dreher. “The doctor asked me to go hunting, and after we started he said he was going to kill Jim LeBoeuf,” Beadle claimed. “I said, ‘No, don’t do that,’ and he said if I didn’t row him, he’d kill me too. When we got on the lake and met their boat, he said, ‘Jim, is that you?’ ‘Yes, who’s that?’ LeBoeuf answered. Then the doctor shot him. Dr. Dreher said, ‘Let’s go get that iron. I want to sink that son of a bitch in the lake.’ ” According to Beadle, it was Dreher who also gutted the corpse.

Taking the stand in his own defense, the doctor offered a very different version. At half past three on July 1, he testified, he had received Ada’s note saying that “her
husband had agreed to meet me on the lake and clear up all this foolishness in a friendly way.” A few hours later, at about six o’clock, he drove to Beadle’s house and asked if he “could take me out” in his boat. To Dreher’s surprise, Beadle insisted on bringing along his shotgun. “I said, ‘Jim what do you want with a gun?’ He said, ‘Times are hard and we might see an alligator and that might mean two or three dollars for its hide.’ ”

Rowing far out onto the lake, they came upon Jim LeBoeuf and Ada, who were in separate boats. “As we got close, I called out, ‘Hello, is that you, Jim?’ and he said, ‘Yes, who’s that?’ I said, ‘It’s me, Doc. I got a message from your wife this afternoon that we were to meet on the lake and talk over this foolishness and be friends.’ He said, ‘Friends, God damn, no! You know I told you if you ever spoke to me again, I’d kill you. And there’s that Beadle, too. I got the pair of you just where I want you now.’ ” With that, LeBoeuf had pulled out a small automatic pistol and fired a shot.

“At the same instant,” Dreher continued, “Beadle grabbed his shotgun and made two shots and LeBoeuf fell in the pirogue. I said, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’ Jim said, ‘He made the first shot and there wasn’t anything else to do but shoot him.’ ”

Dreher proposed that, “since the man was killed in self defense,” they should “take him into town and turn him over to the authorities.” Beadle, however, had other ideas. “ ‘I’ll fix him so that nobody will ever find him,’ he said. He said he knew where there was some angle irons and suggested that we get them and weigh him down.”

After getting the angle irons, the pair “went back to the lake. Jim pulled the boat up to where he could reach the body and after he tied the irons on, he said, ‘Well, there ain’t anything to do but sink his body in the lake. I suppose a man’s just like a deer. If a deer sinks, in just a couple of hours gas forms in the stomach and the body rises. I guess I better cut his body open so the body won’t rise up.’ He slit the stomach open. While he slit it, I turned my head and didn’t see how he did it.’ ”

I
N THE END,
Beadle’s strategy worked. Despite widespread predictions that no southern jury would send a white woman to the gallows, Ada and Dreher were both sentenced to hang, while Beadle, though convicted, was spared the ultimate penalty and given life imprisonment.

If the trial itself was disappointingly short of drama, the aftermath more than made up for that deficiency. When the Louisiana Supreme Court rejected an appeal
for a new trial, public sentiment suddenly “turned in favor” of the condemned pair. “Hundreds of women in the Franklin area circulated petitions to the state pardon board and governor for clemency,” while “newspapers that had previously played up the gory details of the murder began whipping up opinion to demand mercy.” As historian T. Harry Williams points out in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Huey Long:

Even the men who had voted for their conviction joined in the crusade. Along with other jurors, foreman L. S. Allen petitioned the state pardon board for clemency, attesting that the “death verdict had been unduly influenced by the high feelings existing at the time against” the two defendants. New exculpatory evidence was also introduced. A prison guard named Wright swore that he had overheard Jim Beadle admit to the killing. At around the same time, two crawfishermen happened upon a discarded pistol not far from the murder site. Jim LeBoeuf’s eldest son, Joe, testified that it was identical to the model owned by his father. One of its chambers, moreover, had been discharged, supporting the contention of Ada and Dreher that LeBoeuf had fired first.

On December 21, 1928—the date originally set for their execution—the prisoners received the happy news that the pardon board had voted for clemency. Though “the board itself could not commute the sentence to life imprisonment, it could recommend the commutation to the governor, and hardly ever had a governor refused to follow the board’s advice.”

Unfortunately for Ada and Doc, they had become pawns in a nasty political power
struggle. The head of the pardon board was Paul Cyr, the state’s lieutenant governor and a bitter foe of Huey Long. After “several sleepless days and nights trying to figure out what to do,” Long—partly out of genuine conviction but mostly to thwart his hated rival, Cyr—rejected the board’s recommendation. “This was a cold-blooded murder,” he announced, “and the law should be allowed to take its course.” The new execution date was set for January 5, 1929.

The climax of the tragedy had all the nail-biting suspense of one of those classic prison movies that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, wondering if the last-minute reprieve will arrive before the executioner throws the switch. No sooner had Long issued his announcement than another of his opponents intervened: Charles O’Niell, chief justice of the state supreme court. The lone dissenter in the tribunal’s earlier decision, O’Niell now took it upon himself to issue a writ “directing the sheriff of St. Mary parish not to carry out the order for execution.” Long was forced to grant a temporary reprieve while O’Niell’s unprecedented maneuver was reviewed by the full court.

In the meantime, word reached Lieutenant Governor Cyr that Jim Beadle had undergone a change of heart and was “hysterically begging to confess.” Cyr rushed to the state penitentiary at Angola to interview Beadle, only to be informed that “Governor Long had issued an order that no one could speak with the prisoner.”

On January 18, exactly two weeks after O’Niell had issued his stay, the state supreme court ruled that the chief justice had “overstepped his authority in granting the earlier reprieve.” Ada and Dreher’s lawyers made a last-ditch effort to persuade the U.S. District Court that their clients “were now insane and should not be hanged because new Louisiana law prohibited the hanging of the insane.” When this desperate bid failed, Long promptly “set the execution for February 1” and “warned the sheriff of St. Mary that, if he had to, he would call out the militia to enforce the order.”