Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (45 page)

T
HE HANGING TOOK
place, as scheduled, on Friday, February 1, 1929. Ada went first. Wearing a pink housedress, she was led to the gallows at a few minutes past noon. “Oh God, isn’t this a terrible thing?” she sobbed as the hangman slipped the black hood over her head and her skirt was tied around her knees “to prevent it from parachuting immodestly when she fell.” Dreher died with Christ’s words on his lips: “Oh God in heaven, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

The following day, a lengthy farewell note composed by Dreher on the eve of his execution and entrusted to a local reporter was released to the Associate Press. “Poor Mrs. LeBoeuf and I go to our doom tomorrow,” it read in part.

Jim Beadle spent just ten years behind bars. Released in April 1939, he died a few years later of natural causes.

T
HOUGH THE ABDUCTION AND MURDER OF THE
L
INDBERGH BABY IN
1932
REMAINS
the single most infamous case of its kind in American history, it was preceded by a number of sensational child snatchings, beginning with that of little Charley Ross, regarded as our country’s first kidnapping for ransom.

Sometime on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 1, 1874, four-year-old Charley and his five-year-old brother, Walter, sons of a prosperous Philadelphia merchant, were playing on the sidewalk in front of their house when they were enticed into a buggy by two men who offered them candy and promised to buy them fireworks for the Fourth of July. Walter was later released. Charley was never seen again.

Three days later, Mr. Ross received the first of an eventual twenty-three crudely misspelled letters, demanding $20,000 (roughly $400,000 in today’s dollars) and threatening Charley with “instant anihilation” if “yu put the cops hunting for him.” Warned by authorities that paying the ransom would only encourage other kidnappings, Ross stalled for time while the Philadelphia police, aided by Pinkerton detectives, embarked on a massive—and ultimately futile—search for the missing child.

Five months after the abduction, a pair of career criminals named William Mosher and Joseph Douglas were shot while attempting to burglarize a house in Brooklyn. The mortally wounded Douglas lived just long enough to confess that he and his
partner were the ones who “stole Charley Ross from Germantown.” He could not, however, say where the little boy was. Only Mosher knew Charley’s whereabouts. And Mosher had been slain on the spot.

Not long afterward, a third man, an embittered ex-policeman named William Westervelt, was arrested, tried, and convicted of conspiring in the kidnapping, described by the presiding judge as “the worst crime of the century.” Westervelt, however, maintained his innocence to the end. Christian Ross spent the rest of his life and his entire fortune searching for his lost son. But Charley would never be found.

I
N SUCCEEDING DECADES,
other child abductions became nationwide sensations. In December 1900, sixteen-year-old Ed Cudahy, son of a Nebraska meatpacking tycoon, was snatched from the streets of his fashionable Omaha neighborhood by a pair of men in a buggy. The following morning, a ransom note was left on the front lawn of the Cudahy mansion. In it, the kidnappers demanded $25,000 for the safe return of Ed, threatened to “put acid in his eyes and blind him” if the money wasn’t paid, and advised his father not to repeat the mistake of Christian Ross, who by refusing to “give up the coin” had “died of a broken heart.”

Nine years later, another child of wealth—eight-year-old Billy Whitla, nephew of a Pennsylvania steel millionaire—was allowed to leave school with a man who claimed to be picking him up for his father. The following day, a letter arrived at the Whitla home, demanding $10,000 and leaving no doubt as to the consequences of refusal. “Dead boys are not desirable,” read the note’s chilling final line.

The ordeals of Ed Cudahy and Billy Whitla ended happily for both victims: the ransoms were paid and the boys released unharmed. Infinitely more tragic was the fate of Marion Parker, whose 1927 abduction—overshadowed by both the murder of Bobby Franks at the hands of Leopold and Loeb and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping—nevertheless stands as one of the most appalling cases in the annals of twentieth-century American crime.

I
N LATER YEARS
, after he had gained nationwide notoriety for the most sickening atrocity of his time, psychiatrists who examined William Edward Hickman—Ed, as he
liked to be called—found ample evidence of madness in his family history. His maternal grandmother, Rebecca Buck, was certifiably psychotic. Convinced that her neighbors “had it in for her” and that her husband meant to poison her, she would run screaming through the fields of her Arkansas farm or huddle weeping for hours in a corner of the barn. Paul Buck, Hickman’s grandfather, was known to beat his own livestock half to death during one of his frequent “mad fits” of rage.

Most unstable of all was their daughter, Eva—Hickman’s mother. The torturous pain accompanying the delivery of her first child left her with a terror of pregnancy and a deep abhorrence of sex. Persuaded by her zealot father that it was her duty to obey St. Paul’s admonition—“Wives submit yourselves unto your husbands as you would unto the Lord”—she gave in to her husband’s conjugal demands. Each of her subsequent pregnancies only drove her further into “puerperal mania.” When she found herself pregnant with Ed, her fourth son, she threatened to carve the baby out of her womb. “I am going to get it out of me,” she shrieked to her husband. “I am going to take a knife and rip myself open.”

Ed’s premature birth in 1908 was particularly nightmarish. Eva, in labor for thirty-six hours, had to be chloroformed, and the infant—delivered in a breech position—emerged from the womb black and apparently stillborn. Only the heroic efforts of the attending physicians brought him to life.

Eva gave birth to one more child, a girl named Mary. Soon afterward, she attempted suicide by swallowing carbolic acid and was committed to the state insane asylum at Little Rock. Upon her release, she seemed much improved. Gradually, however, her madness returned. When her husband left for work in the morning, she would tell him that when he “came home, he would find the children all cut up and piled like cordwood in the middle of the floor.” At night, sleeping in a room with all five children, he would awaken to find her standing at his bedside, a butcher knife in hand. He began to barricade the door with a chair. Eventually the situation became more than he could handle. In 1915 he abandoned the family and moved to New Mexico. At the time, his son Ed was seven.

L
IVING IN CRUSHING
poverty with a frighteningly unstable mother, Ed was taken under the wing of his fanatically religious grandfather. Accompanying the old man to frenzied, fire-and-brimstone tent meetings, the impressionable boy soon was infused with
a burning zeal that, with his grandfather’s encouragement, developed into a fierce determination to become a minister of the Gospel.

His sense of high spiritual calling did not prevent him from indulging in extreme forms of juvenile cruelty. Boyhood acquaintances would later testify to Hickman’s “mania for capturing and torturing stray dogs and cats.” On one occasion, he strangled the pet kitten of a neighbor girl who, even as a grown-up, vividly recalled the “apparent delight” he derived from the act.

Ed was still a preadolescent when Eva, in an effort to stave off starvation, uprooted herself and her brood and moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Her two oldest sons quickly found good-paying jobs, while Ed devoted himself to his studies. By the time he entered high school, he had become convinced that God—pictured in his mind as a rugged old revivalist with a white suit, white tie, white shoes, and “eyes that would burn a hole through you”—meant him “to become America’s most influential clergyman.”

From his freshman through his junior years, he was an academic star, achieving a straight-A average, while serving as vice president of the student body, editor of the school newspaper, staffer on the yearbook, and member of the debating team. During his senior year, however, he underwent a bizarre transformation. The charming and ambitious young student, admired by his schoolmates and considered a “dormant genius” by his teachers, turned into a surly and paranoid loner, cutting himself off from friends, ignoring his studies, and quitting his extracurricular activities. At the time, his acquaintances blamed this “strange reversal in attitude” on the bitter disappointment he suffered when he lost by one vote in the annual oratorical contest sponsored by the Kansas City Star, which he’d set his heart on winning. Forensic psychiatrists, however, would later opine that Ed’s “insidious degeneration” was an early symptom of latent insanity.

Following graduation, Ed was still toying with the idea of a life in the ministry and applied to a local seminary, Park College, but he withdrew his registration before the semester began. After working at a few dead-end jobs—including a stint at a poultry house where he spent several months disemboweling and disjointing chickens—he took a part-time position at the Kansas City Public Library. There he made the acquaintance of another employee, a budding young sociopath named Welby Hunt. Despite a gap in their ages (Hunt, fourteen at the time, was four years younger than Ed), the two were soon inseparable companions. On the day after Thanksgiving,
1926—less than two months after they met—they armed themselves with handguns and robbed a downtown candy store, making off with $70.

A few days later, in the first week of December, they set off by car to Los Angeles, where on Christmas Eve, just days after their arrival, they held up a pharmacy at gunpoint. When a neighborhood patrolman happened into the store, a shootout erupted that left the proprietor, Clarence Thoms, mortally wounded. Deciding to lie low for a while, Hickman—who, like other psycho killers before and since, concealed his malevolent self beneath a clean-cut, college-boy persona—found work as a messenger at the First National Trust and Savings Bank in downtown L.A. It wasn’t long, however, before his criminal compulsions asserted themselves. He began to forge small checks, using the proceeds to purchase a used motorcycle. Caught and arrested in mid-June 1927, he was tried in juvenile court and—largely because the bogus checks were for such paltry sums—let off with probation. With the stunning brazenness typical of psychopaths, he immediately applied for reinstatement to his former job at the bank. Unsurprisingly, he was rejected.

By August he was back in Kansas City, working nights as an usher at a movie theater and thinking vaguely of returning to school. He did, in fact, enroll in Kansas City Junior College but once again withdrew before attending a single class. Shortly afterward, he was fired from his job “because of unsatisfactory work.” According to Hickman’s later accounts, he then stole a car and embarked on a month-long odyssey that began in Chicago and took him through Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, financing the trip by knocking over a succession of small shops along the way. Whatever the truth of this claim, it is certain that he was back in Kansas City by November 7, when he stole a Chrysler coupe at gunpoint from a physician named Herbert Mantz and drove it to California, arriving in Los Angeles on November 18. Over the next few weeks, he committed yet another string of drugstore holdups.