Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (49 page)

It took the jury less than two hours to convict her. Pearl was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. By the time she was removed to the Colorado State Penitentiary, she had been divorced by Leo, who had made a full recovery. The newly single, ruggedly handsome detective was besieged by letters from female admirers, offering themselves as replacements for Pearl. As far as marriage went, however, Leo—as he told an interviewer—was “all through. Since my last experience, I am no longer matrimonially inclined.”

H
E WAS, IN THE WORDS OF HIS EARLIEST BIOGRAPHER,
“
THE MOST FIENDISH
human being of his day”—perpetrator of “one of the most monstrous mass murders in world history, the most horrible tragedy in American annals.” Yet this Depression-era psycho, whose crimes appalled and titillated millions of his contemporaries, is barely remembered today. He stands as a prime example of the curious workings of infamy—the mysterious forces that bestow near-mythical status on some notorious killers while consigning others to near-total oblivion.

I
N THE BYGONE
days before Internet dating services, singles looking to meet prospective mates sometimes availed themselves of the services of matrimonial bureaus—mail-order matchmaking agencies that provided subscribers with lists of potential partners. One of these operations was the American Friendship Society of Detroit, which lured customers with classified ads in pulp true-romance magazines: “
LONELY HEARTS
—Join the world’s greatest social extension club, meet nice people who, like yourself, are lonely (many wealthy). One may be your ideal. We have made thousands happy. Why not you?”

Among the many desperate love seekers who replied to this come-on was a
fifty-year-old Danish-born widow named Asta Buick Eicher, resident of Oak Park, Illinois, and mother of three children—fourteen-year-old Greta, twelve-year-old Harry, and nine-year-old Annabelle. In early 1931, Mrs. Eicher—a cultivated, artistically inclined woman who had reputedly inherited a tidy sum from her late husband, a prosperous silversmith—received a letter from a gentleman who identified himself as Cornelius O. Pierson of Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Harry Powers aka Herman Drenth

Pierson, so he claimed, was a successful civil engineer with a net worth of $150,000 (more than $2 million in today’s dollars) and “a beautiful ten-room house, completely furnished.” Because his heavy business responsibilities prevented him “from making many social contacts,” he had turned to the American Friendship Society to help him “make the acquaintance of the right type of woman.” From Mrs. Eicher’s listing, he felt she might be a suitable partner. “My wife,” he wrote, “would have her own car and plenty of spending money.”

Before long, the two had embarked on a long-distance, mail-order courtship. As their epistolary romance heated up, Pierson plied the full-fleshed widow with his particular brand of sweet talk. In response to a Kodak photograph she sent, he exclaimed over how “well preserved” she was, and assured her that he “preferred plump women.” He also let her know that he understood the deepest needs of the opposite sex. “The great trouble is that men are so ignorant that they do not know that women must be caressed,” he purred.

Sometime in the spring of 1931, at Mrs. Eicher’s invitation, Pierson made the
first of several trips to her home in suburban Chicago. History does not record how she reacted to her first glimpse of her long-distance suitor. From his letters, she expected a tall, handsome, distinguished-looking gentleman with dark wavy hair and “clear blue eyes.” What she saw was a bespectacled, beady-eyed, moon-faced fellow standing barely five feet seven inches tall and weighing just under two hundred pounds—“squat, pig-eyed, and paunchy,” as one contemporary described him. Nevertheless, she appears to have been quite taken with him, inviting him back for several more visits in the following months and proudly introducing him to her neighbors as a man of substance, with investments in oil and gas wells, farmland, and “stocks and bonds paying from six to forty percent dividends.”

Those same neighbors were the ones who notified the police when Mrs. Eicher and her children mysteriously disappeared in late June. Searching her house, detectives discovered twenty-seven letters from Cornelius Pierson. Two months passed before authorities managed to trace Mrs. Eicher’s love interest to his home in Clarksburg, West Virginia. His name turned out not to be Pierson at all. It was Harry F. Powers. And far from being a wealthy bachelor with money from oil wells, dairy farms, and high-yield bonds, he was a married vacuum cleaner salesman whose wife, Leulla, supplemented their meager income by selling sundries from a little shop adjacent to their cottage.

At first Powers denied any knowledge of Mrs. Eicher. Confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of his more than two dozen love notes, he admitted that they had corresponded but insisted that he knew nothing about her disappearance.

It wasn’t long, however, before investigators learned that Powers and his wife owned a small plot of land, inherited from her father, in a place called Quiet Dell, a bucolic little village nestled in the hills just a few miles outside Clarksburg. Proceeding to the property, detectives discovered a tumbledown wooden bungalow that clearly had been vacant for years. Directly across the narrow dirt road, however, stood a large, shed-like structure that appeared to be a newly built garage. The door was secured with a pair of heavy padlocks that were quickly pried open with a crowbar. The interior was big enough to accommodate three automobiles. But there were no cars inside—just a pile of cartons and trunks that turned out to be packed with the personal belongings of Mrs. Eicher and her three children.

One of the officers noticed a trapdoor in the concrete floor. Swinging it open, he was assaulted by a heavy stench wafting up from below. Beaming their flashlights into
the darkness, several officers descended the wooden steps. As they swept their lights around, they saw at once that the cellar had been used as a prison. The space was divided into four cramped, soundproofed cells, each fitted with a heavy wooden door. Small, iron-grated apertures in the exterior walls allowed some weak rays of sunshine to penetrate the gloom. Otherwise, there was no light or ventilation. Nor were there any furnishings—just a bare, filthy mattress on the concrete floor of each cell.

Apart from a few bloodstained articles of clothing scattered about, there was no sign of the victims.

The corpses weren’t discovered until the following day, when officers from the sheriff’s department and the state police—supplemented by a road gang from the county jail—began excavating the property. Stuffed in burlap sacks, the bodies were buried in a shallow drainage ditch that ran from the rear of the garage to a nearby creek. That same evening, the diggers came upon the remains of a fifth victim. She was quickly identified as fifty-one-year-old Dorothy Lemke of Northboro, Massachusetts, who had not been seen since the previous month, when she withdrew $1,555 from her bank and went off with her mail-order fiancé, Cornelius Pierson.

Based on the autopsy results, authorities concluded that Mrs. Eicher and her children had been starved and tortured before being put to death. Evidence in the “death dungeon”—as the tabloids promptly dubbed the cellar—suggested that the mother had been hanged from a ceiling beam, perhaps in full view of her children. When the boy, Harry—who had been bound with rope and gagged with “garage waste”—had tried to struggle free to save his mother, his skull had been beaten in with a hammer. He had also been castrated. His sisters, like Dorothy Lemke, had been strangled.

Informed of these grisly finds, Powers continued to maintain his innocence, insisting that the bodies must have been buried on his property by someone else. At that point—around eight-thirty in the evening of Friday, August 28—his interrogators began applying the third degree. For the next eight hours, Powers was punched, kicked, flogged with a rubber hose, beaten with a ball-peen hammer, burned with cigarettes, and jabbed with needles. His left arm was broken and hot boiled eggs were pressed under his armpits. Finally, at around four o’clock Saturday morning, he broke. “I did it,” he sobbed. “My God, I want some rest.” His face badly swollen, his flabby body a mass of bruises, burns, puncture wounds, and welts, he was taken to the infirmary, where he signed a statement confessing to the murder of Mrs. Eicher and her children “by using a hammer and strangulation.”

In the meantime, news of the atrocities had spread across the region. Throughout the night, hundreds of people streamed through the Romine Funeral Home in Clarksburg for a glimpse of the five victims, who had been laid out in open coffins. The following day, Sunday, August 30, an estimated thirty thousand curiosity seekers overran the “murder farm” (as the papers immediately dubbed the property), turning that sweltering summer Sabbath “into a morbid holiday.” A dozen county policemen were dispatched to the scene to direct traffic, while a few enterprising locals attempted to erect a six-foot wooden fence around the “death den” and charge an admission fee. Outraged at having the site of the tragedy transformed into what one observer called a “mass murder amusement park,” an angry mob tore down the barricade, “and everyone was then free to visit the death spot without charge or restraint.”

Over the following weeks, investigators dug deep into the background of the man now known in the tabloids as “the Bluebeard of Quiet Dell.” It quickly emerged that “Harry F. Powers” was merely another pseudonym, one of many that the lifelong criminal had employed over the years. His real name was Herman Drenth. Born in Holland in 1892, he had immigrated to New York in 1910. Over the next dozen years, he had led a rootless life, residing for brief periods in Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Illinois, and Pennsylvania before ending up in West Virginia in 1926. During that period, he had done two stints in jail, once in Iowa for burglary, the second in Indiana for defrauding a widow of $5,400.

In 1929, he had married the former Leulla Strother of Clarksburg. A forty-one-year-old divorcée with an unfortunate marital track record, Strother had previously been wed to a local farmer named Ernest Knisely, who was arrested and tried for murder after fracturing the skull of a neighbor during a violent altercation. It was not long after she and Powers exchanged vows that he hit on his matrimonial-bureau scheme, joining a number of these mail-order services (including one that advertised itself as “Cupid’s Headquarters”) and securing the names of several hundred potential victims. At the time of his arrest, five letters—sealed, stamped, and addressed to women in New York, Maryland, Detroit, and North Carolina—were found in his possession.