Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (56 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
Eddie was completely dependent on his mother and was considered a mama’s boy. The mother image dominated his whole life. He could not free himself from it. That his three victims were all women considerably older than he was is psychiatrically most significant. He unconsciously linked their voices with his mother. The whole psychological explosion occurred in a period of deprivation when he was away from home and separated from his mother—but not from her dominating image. The deeds constituted symbolic matricide.
Medical officers appointed to examine Leonski, however, concluded that though he was a psychopathic personality with a murderous mother complex, the prisoner was not psychotic. Found guilty, he was sentenced to die at Pentridge prison on November 9, 1942, his order of execution personally signed by General MacArthur. On the eve of his hanging, he was in a jovial mood, joking to a visitor: “If you’ve got any more dames you want choking, just bring ’em along and I’ll fix ’em for you.”
With his death, he earned a special distinction in the annals of infamy as the second American soldier to be executed in World War II (the first, army private James Rowe, convicted of murdering a fellow soldier at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, preceded him by three weeks, having gone to the gallows on October 17, 1942).
Like the familicide William Beadle (see
this page
), whose execrated corpse was repeatedly dug up and moved by his outraged neighbors, Eddie Leonski was not allowed to rest easy after death. Immediately after his hanging, he was buried in disgrace in a remote section of Melbourne’s Springvale Cemetery that turned out to be reserved for Indonesians. On December 5, 1944, his remains were exhumed and transferred to another isolated site in the same cemetery. The following May, he was dug up again and moved to a cemetery in Ipswich, Queensland. He remained there for two and a half years. It was not until 1947 that he reached his final resting place: Honolulu, Hawaii, where, along with a half dozen other executed American servicemen, he was laid to rest in a segregated section of the Schofield Barracks military cemetery—a “shameful slice of American soil.”
Other serial killers have had a hard time finding final resting places. In April 1895, two young San Francisco women, eighteen-year-old Blanche Lamont and twenty-one-year-old Minnie Williams, went missing. Not long afterward, their horribly mutilated corpses were discovered inside the Emanuel Baptist Church on Barrett Street, one shoved inside a storage room, the other stashed in the steeple. The perpetrator of these atrocities turned out to be a handsome young medical student, Theodore Durrant, quickly dubbed the “Demon of the Belfry.” Despite his protestations of innocence, a jury took only five minutes to convict him at the end of a sensational three-week trial. Following his hanging in January 1898, his corpse was brought to the prison waiting room in an open coffin, where—in full view of their child’s ghastly remains—his parents refreshed themselves with a hearty roast beef meal before taking his body away for burial. Such was the public’s antipathy toward Durrant, however, that no cemetery in San Francisco would accept him. His parents were finally forced to transport the cadaver to Los Angeles for cremation.
Fearing that his own corpse might be exhumed after burial by either medical men eager to dissect it or ghoulish showmen hoping to put it on display, Durrant’s contemporary Dr. H. H. Holmes—aka the “Chicago Bluebeard”—took precautions to ensure that his bones would remain undisturbed. Immediately after his execution at Moyamensing State Prison in May 1896, his body was placed in a cement-filled casket, which was then lowered into a jumbo-sized grave and blanketed with another layer of cement, two feet thick, before being covered with dirt.
Though rumors persist that the body of Ed Gein, the infamous “Butcher of Plainfield,” was removed from its original resting place by indignant locals who did not want him defiling their cemetery and insisted that he be buried elsewhere, he does in fact reside in his family’s plot in Plainfield Cemetery. His headstone, however, has never been left in peace. Because
of the perverse admiration he inspires in horror fans—who, thanks to his role as the model for Norman Bates and Leatherface, see him as the “granddaddy of gore”—his grave has become a macabre pilgrimage site. Chunks of his original tombstone were chipped away by ghoulish relic hunters until the whole thing was stolen in 2001. Though subsequently recovered, it has been kept in storage ever since to keep it safe from collectors of serial killer souvenirs.
[
Sources: Ivan Chapman, Leonski: The Brownout Strangler (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1982); Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Marilyn Lake, “The Desire for a Yank: Sexual Relations Between Australian Women and American Servicemen during World War II,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 4 (April 1992): 621–633; Max Haines, True Crime Stories: 50 Headline-Grabbing Murders from Around the World (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987).
]
AND THE
BLUEBELLE
’S LAST VOYAGE
T
ABLOID NEWSPAPERS HAVE ALWAYS THRIVED ON SENSATIONAL MURDERS
. T
HEIR
editorial credo is the cynical journalistic saying “If it bleeds, it leads.” An early issue of Mad magazine perfectly captures the shamelessly lurid nature of such trashy publications in a mock tabloid called The Daily Poop, whose contents consist almost entirely of stories like “Man Carves up His Girlfriend,” “Killer Admits Using Meat Grinder,” “Girl Beaten,” and “Most Nauseating Crime Ever.” Tucked away on page five among classified ads for pimple medication, nose drops, and weight-loss pills is an item in microscopically small print about the outbreak of World War III.
The situation is very different with the staid
New York Times
, the “Gray Lady” of American journalism, which spurns any story that smacks of sensationalism. To make the front page of the “paper of record,” a murder has to be exceptionally newsworthy. On November 21, 1961—along with articles about President Kennedy’s meeting with Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany, a hunger strike by Algerian rebels, a United Nations proposal to assist the Congolese government, and a Supreme Court ruling exempting women from jury duty—an article appeared on page one of the Times headlined “Rescued Girl’s Story Indicates Skipper Killed Others on Yacht.” The skipper in question was a dashing sociopath named Julian Harvey. For all the
attention his horrific crime generated at the time, however, he quickly faded into oblivion. Even the highly publicized reemergence of his only surviving victim, fifty years after the atrocity, failed to reignite interest in this strange all-American psycho.
B
ORN AND BRED
in landlocked Wisconsin, Arthur Duperrault developed a love for tropical waters as a navy man in the South Pacific during World War II. In the years following his discharge, while building a reputation as one of Green Bay’s leading optometrists, he harbored a dream to take his family on a lazy island-hopping cruise in the Bahamas. In 1961, determined not to delay any longer, he took an extended leave from his practice, made arrangements with his children’s school, and headed down to Florida with his wife, Jean, and their three bright and vibrant kids: fourteen-year-old Brian, eleven-year-old Terry Jo, and seven-year-old René.
The initial plan was to buy a boat and spend the entire fall “vagabonding in southern waters.” Unable to find a suitable vessel, they decided to charter one instead. At Fort Lauderdale’s Bahia Mar yacht basin, they found what they were looking for: a sleek, sixty-foot, two-masted ketch called
Bluebelle
, skippered by a Hollywood-handsome forty-four-year-old named Julian Harvey who lived aboard with his wife of four months, a former TWA stewardess named Mary Dene.
Harvey was not only a former military man, like “Doc” Duperrault, but a bona fide war hero, a decorated bomber pilot in World War II and Korea. He was also a highly experienced sailor and former owner of a number of racing yachts. Everything about him inspired confidence. But as with most psychopaths, his inviting veneer concealed the dark, hidden truths of his life.
J
ULIAN
H
ARVEY HAD
the kind of improbable life story that could have been concocted by a studio screenwriter. He never knew his biological father, who left his mother—a beautiful Broadway chorus girl—when Julian was still an infant. A few years later, she married a vaudeville impresario who indulged the boy’s every desire, reportedly buying him a sailboat for his tenth birthday, the beginning of his lifelong love of sailing. Though the Depression severely disrupted his home life, it didn’t affect the level of affluence he enjoyed. When his mother’s second marriage broke up in the aftermath of the 1929 crash, he was sent to live with a wealthy aunt and uncle who pampered him in the style he had grown accustomed to.
Scrawny as a child, he threw himself into bodybuilding, becoming a fitness fanatic decades before the workout craze took hold of America. By the time he reached adolescence, he had developed a splendid physique that he obsessively maintained throughout his life and never tired of flaunting. His face—ruggedly handsome and framed by golden curls—matched the beauty of his body. For a while, he worked as a male model for the famed John Roberts Powers Agency. A surviving publicity shot shows him posed in nothing but a skimpy swimsuit, aiming a drawn bow and arrow and looking like a combination of Tarzan and Cupid.
It was around this time that he first manifested a tendency that would remain a grimly recurrent feature of his life: a strange “affinity for accidents,” as one journalist put it. He was behind the wheel of his first car, a Model A Ford convertible, when a wheel came off. He and his passenger, a male friend, managed to leap to safety as the car spun out of control and flipped over.
After a few aimless years at college, he enlisted in the Air Corps in 1941 and quickly distinguished himself with his wartime heroics. He flew more than thirty combat missions as a bomber pilot, surviving two crash landings. By the fall of 1944, he had won a chestful of medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross, risen from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, and been chosen to pilot the plane in a death-defying test involving the deliberate ditching of a B-24 bomber in Virginia’s James River—a feat that won him another major decoration, the Air Medal. No one doubted his coolness or courage, though there were some who looked askance at the glamour-boy look he affected: the “special-cut Eisenhower jacket, pearl-pink chino trousers, and yellow scarf” he loved to parade around in.
He was, of course, irresistible to women, though notably bad at holding on to them. He’d had five wives before Mary Dene. None of those marriages lasted very long, and one of them ended under deeply suspicious circumstances that would come to seem even more ominous in light of later events.
On the evening of April 21, 1949, Harvey, then residing at Eglin Air Force Base near Valparaiso, Florida, was driving home from the movies with his third wife, Joann, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Myrtle Boylen. As they crossed an old wooden bridge over a bayou, the car went into a skid, crashed through the railing, and plunged into the murky waters. Both women drowned in the submerged car. Harvey escaped without a scratch.
He later told investigators that he had seen “the accident coming, and at the last minute I opened the door and was thrown free.” The professional diver who went
down to retrieve the bodies, however, found all four doors locked and the driver’s window rolled down, suggesting a very different scenario: namely, that Harvey had gone down into the water along with Joann and her mother, then opened his window and escaped, leaving the two women to drown. Joann’s father, convinced that Harvey’s story was full of holes—and made deeply suspicious by his son-in-law’s weirdly blasé reaction to Joann’s death—demanded an official investigation. One military doctor who interviewed Harvey during this period concluded “that underneath his veneer of charm and sophistication was an amoral man with no real empathy for others, a man who could be dangerous.” Still, authorities could find no hard evidence of any criminal action on Harvey’s part, and the matter was dropped.
A few months later, after collecting on his wife’s life insurance policy, Harvey was married again, this time to a young Texas businesswoman named Jitty. Though their marriage endured for three years, they saw virtually nothing of each other during that time. Just three months after their wedding, Harvey was sent to Korea, where he flew another 114 combat missions and added a bunch of decorations to his already impressive collection. When he returned to the states in 1953, he and Jitty were promptly divorced.
Within a year, he was married to his fifth wife, Georgianna. By then he had left the military and, fulfilling a long-cherished dream, had purchased a sixty-eight-foot yawl, the Torbatross. Less than a year later, with Harvey at the helm, the Torbatross sank in Chesapeake Bay after ramming into the submerged wreckage of an old World War I battleship, the USS Texas, that had been bombed in 1921 during a historic demonstration of military airpower. There were strong indications that the collision was no accident. The Texas, as one journalist reported, “was a notorious navigational hazard, marked by a buoy, and its exact location was known and visible.” Several witnesses, moreover, testified that Harvey had “deliberately circled the wreck twice” before his boat ran into it. Despite the suspicious nature of the incident, however, Harvey eventually won a settlement of $14,258 (around $112,000 today) from the U.S. government.
He used the money to buy another boat, an eighty-one-foot luxury yawl, Valiant. In 1958—in the midst of an ugly alimony fight with Georgianna, who was suing him for divorce on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty—he was captaining the Valiant in the Gulf of Mexico when the boat mysteriously caught fire and sank. Once again, Harvey escaped unscathed. This time, he collected $40,000 on the insurance, a sum that conveniently saved him from his financial difficulties.