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Authors: Harold Schechter
Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (50 page)
As the investigation dragged on, rumors began to swirl that the outraged citizens of Clarksburg planned to take matters into their own hands. The crisis came to a head on the night of Saturday, September 19—nearly a month after Powers’ arrest—when a lynch mob of more than four thousand men and women surrounded the jailhouse, crying out for the monster’s blood. They were met by a contingent of heavily armed
lawmen—the sheriff and all his deputies, the entire city police force, and a detachment of state troopers—who warned the crowd “to stay back or they would be shot down in their tracks.” Ignoring the threat, the mob surged forward. After firing a few warning shots over the crowd, the police let loose a barrage of tear gas. In the ensuing confusion, eight of the rioters were grabbed and arrested, while the rest, “choking and crying from the fumes,” fell back and eventually dispersed. In the midst of this uproar, Powers was hustled out the rear of the building into a waiting automobile and—escorted by a pair of police cars—driven to the state penitentiary at Moundsville a hundred miles away, where he would remain locked in solitary until the start of his trial.
Anticipating an insanity plea on the part of the defense, prosecutors called in a well-known forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Edwin H. Meyers, to examine Powers. After examining Powers in his cell for several hours, Meyers pronounced him legally sane, someone who “knows right from wrong,” but clearly psychopathic—“possessed of an exaggerated lust to kill which dominates his entire personality.” Though motivated partly by financial greed, Powers derived his deepest gratification from contemplating, planning, and then carrying out his atrocities—“tormenting, torturing, and punishing his victims before strangling or beating them to death.” He was driven, in short, “by the mere love of killing.”
Knowing how many spectators would flock to Powers’ trial, county officials decided to conduct it in the largest venue available—the city opera house. The show opened on December 7, 1931, with the principal players—the judge and jury, the witnesses, the defendant and his lawyers, and the prosecuting attorneys—seated onstage. For the five days of its duration, it drew a standing-room-only crowd who watched with rapt absorption. Powers, by contrast, sat through the proceedings with a look of utter indifference—“a bland gum-chewing observer of a drama that seemed to bore him,” as one reporter wrote.
His expression remained impassive even when the jury returned a guilty verdict on the afternoon of December 11, after less than two hours of deliberation. Nor did he evince the slightest emotion three months later when he was led to the gallows in Moundsville State Penitentiary. The town itself, as the local paper reported, “had taken on a holiday festive appearance in preparation for the execution of the man whose crimes startled the world. Outside the prison a crowd gathered along the curbs. Automobiles were lined up for blocks.”
Nattily dressed in a black pinstripe suit, white broadcloth shirt, and gaudy blue necktie, the condemned man ascended the scaffold with absolute composure and gazed steadily at the forty-two assembled witnesses before the black hood was slipped over his head. Asked if he had any last words, he calmly replied, “No.” A moment later, at precisely 9:00 a.m. on Friday, March 18, 1932, the trap was sprung. Neck broken, he dangled from the end of the rope for eleven full minutes before the prison physicians declared him dead.
Cover page of 1931 sheet music, “The Crime at Quiet Dell”
(
Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Used by permission.
)
Ballads about high-profile homicides continued to be created well into the twentieth century. In contrast to earlier broadsides—single sheets of crude doggerel verse often printed by the authors themselves—the more modern versions took the form of professionally published sheet music.
There have actually been two songs based on the Harry Powers case, both titled “The Crime at Quiet Dell.” The first, credited to A. H. Grow and Leighton D. Davies, appeared in 1931. Appended to the printed lyrics was a note explaining that the song “was not written to appeal to the morbid fancies” of listeners. Rather, it was “intended to serve as a warning that it is folly to listen to the alluring wiles and extravagant promises of total strangers and also to remind some of the old moral, crime does not pay!” Given the song’s loving attention to the most gruesome details of Powers’ crimes, the reader may well question this high-minded claim.
A widow and her children three
At Park Ridge, Illinois,
Was happy and contented
With two daughters and her boy;
And all was well until one day
A letter to her came
Which said she would be wealthy,
If she only changed her name.
Then came the stranger to her home
And told her of his love;
And promised her that life would be
Like heaven up above.
This winsome stranger she believed
And with him she did go,
To meet a fate so horrible
No one on earth will know.
Mid hills of West Virginia fair
Near village Quiet Dell,
A foul crime was committed there
That shocked the depths of hell.
Upon this scene a place was built
Away from sight and sound
With gallows in the upper part
And prisons underground.
The prison poor without a door
Devoid of air and light,
With deadly gas jets on the walls
Presents a gruesome sight.
The bloodstains on the prison floor,
The graveyard just outside,
When taken all together tells
Just how the victims died.
Upon this fatal summer night,
The crime-bent coward crept
Toward the prison down below
Where little Harry slept.
Then took him to the floor above,
Up through the crude trap door;
But little did he realize
His life would soon be o’er.
The poor boy’s mother next he brought,
And as the trap door banged,
He said, “Now boy I’ve brought you up
To see your mother hanged.”
The cruel rope went around her throat
And as she dangled there,
A scream from little Harry came
That rent the midnight air.
With tearful eyes the poor lad cried,
“My own life I will give.
Please have some mercy, Mister,
Let my own dear Mamma live.”
The demon seized a hammer near
And struck with all his brawn,
And as his life ebbed away,
A little soul passed on.
The poor starved sisters next were brought
Upon this horrid scene,
To see their murdered loved ones
And to face their captor mean.
Upon their knees they pleaded but
He heeded not their wails;
And answered, “No, you two must go,
When dead you’ll tell no tales.”
The other widow, fifth in turn,
Was soon to learn her fate.
To be mourned by her loved ones
Up in Massachusetts state.
And when the sun arose next day
In splendor o’er the land,
It shone upon five shallow graves,
Wrought by a murderous hand.
The stealthy fiend in human form
From justice felt secure,
But when confronted with the truth
His nerve could not endure.
The monster of this heinous crime
Now ponders in his cell,
And shudders at the fate he’ll meet
For deeds at Quiet Dell.
This is a solemn warning then
To all the ladies fair
Do not confide in strangers that
You meet from everywhere.
The moral lesson this shall teach
For one can never tell
Lest you be lured unto your doom
Like those at Quiet Dell.
Country singer Chris Stuart first learned about the Harry Powers case from an article in Goldenseal, a magazine devoted to the history, folklore, and culture of West Virginia. The result was his own original song on the subject, a piece that—though composed for his 2008 CD Crooked Man—has the timeless feel of a traditional murder ballad. In contrast to the 1931 version, which lingers to an almost prurient degree on the sufferings of the victims, Stuart’s is more concerned with the “little pig-eyed” perpetrator himself and the community outrage provoked by his atrocities.
Gather round good people, of evil I will tell,
Did you hear about the crime at Quiet Dell?
A little pig-eyed grocer is sittin’ in his cell,
Did you hear about the crime at Quiet Dell?
So if you love your neighbor, go home and get your gun,
We’ll drive the devil out of West Virginia in 1931.
Up around Clarksburg, there’s a little piece of hell,
Did you hear about the crime at Quiet Dell?
The police sent a message from Park Ridge, Illinois,
About a widow, two girls, and a boy,
They said a Mr. Pierson might be to blame,
But down here Harry Powers is his name.
They found that little coward and they dragged him in,
They beat him through the night ’til he told them what he did,
Then he led them to the farmhouse and pointed down the well,
Did you hear about the crime at Quiet Dell?
He lured them with love letters and told them pretty lies,
They saw his fancy roadster and silk ties,
The women and their children, he brought to Quiet Dell,
And he kept them where no one could hear them yell.
So go and tell your neighbor, he’s sleepin’ at the jail,
We’re gonna hang the evil out of Harrison County so good folks will prevail,
Up around Clarksburg, there’s a little piece of hell,
Did you hear about the crime at Quiet Dell?
From the earliest days of our national literature, American authors have been creating fictionalized versions of notorious murders. As far back as 1798, Charles Brockden Brown—the “Father of the American Novel”—used the widely publicized case of a family annihilator named James Yates as the basis for his classic Gothic romance Wieland. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Brown’s admirer Edgar Allan Poe, was partly inspired by the shocking 1840 crime perpetrated by Peter Robinson, who buried his victim beneath the floorboards of his New Brunswick, New Jersey, home (see
this page
). Theodore Dreiser scored a bestseller with his 1925 masterpiece An American Tragedy, a thinly disguised exploration of the sensational Chester Gillette–Grace Brown drowning case of 1906 (see
this page
). Perhaps best known of all is Robert Bloch’s Psycho, the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark 1960 horror film, which sprang from the enormities of Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein (who also served as the model for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface and the serial killer Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’ horror masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs).
Though relatively few people are aware of the fact, Harry F. Powers also inspired a best-selling book: the 1953 thriller Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb, a native of West Virginia who grew up near Powers’ home in Clarksburg and set his novel in Moundsville, where “the Bluebeard of Quiet Dell” was incarcerated in the state penitentiary. Set during the Depression, Grubb’s novel centers on a psychopathic ex-con named Harry Powell, who passes himself off as an itinerant preacher. In his relentless hunt for $10,000 in stolen cash, he woos, weds, and murders a widowed young mother, then pursues her orphaned children, who take flight with the money.
Two years after Grubb’s novel was published to great commercial success and critical acclaim (including a National Book Award nomination), a darkly brilliant movie version—directed by renowned British actor Charles Laughton and adapted by James Agee—hit the screens. Though this highly stylized film noir proved too offbeat for contemporary audiences, it is now recognized as a classic of the genre. As the Harry Powers–inspired serial sex killer Harry Powell, Robert Mitchum—his knuckles tattooed with the words “love” and “hate,” his honeyed voice oozing menace—turns in one of the most chilling performances ever recorded on celluloid.