Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (7 page)

I
N DECEMBER
1840, M
R
. A
BRAHAM
S
UYDAM
,
RESIDENT OF
N
EW
B
RUNSWICK
, N
EW
Jersey, was one of the city’s most prominent men. A well-to-do dry-goods merchant, forty-five years of age, he had recently been named president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank. To bolster his already substantial income, he had also taken to speculating in land.

Eighteen months earlier, he had sold a building lot to a carpenter named Peter Robinson, who took a mortgage from Suydam amounting to $780. A few years younger than Suydam, Robinson had led a knockabout life. Born and raised in poverty, the son of an abusive drunk who abandoned his family when Peter was still a boy, he had grown up—as he put it—“wild and unmanageable.” Unable to deal with her wayward son, his mother shipped him off at twelve to a family in Parsippany, New Jersey, where he apprenticed to a chairmaker named Quinn, a harsh taskmaster of “low moral character.” Eventually Robinson and Quinn came to blows. When, shortly thereafter, Quinn’s barn burned down under mysterious circumstances, young Robinson was accused of arson.

Fleeing to New York City, he found work with a cabinetmaker named Barnes. For the next several years, he spent his days practicing his craft and his nights—as he later confessed—“learning all kinds of wickedness” in the company of “rowdy young
men and young women.” At eighteen, his imagination fired by tales of high-seas adventure, he shipped out to Florida, where he ended up working on a plantation, constructing cotton gins. Returning to New York City a year later, he made his way to New Brunswick, where he married, started a family, and found regular work as a carpenter. In 1839, he purchased the lot from Suydam and, with borrowed money, put up a simple frame house.

At that time—twenty-three years before Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday—Thanksgiving Day was celebrated in New Jersey on December 3. Shortly after he breakfasted that Thursday morning, Abraham Suydam informed his wife that he had an appointment at ten o’clock but would be back in time to accompany her to church at eleven. Then—after removing some papers from his bureau drawer and checking the time on his gold pocket watch—he left his house.

He never returned.

Within twenty-four hours, news of the banker’s mysterious disappearance had spread through the city, generating what newspapers described as “a terrible excitement” among the populace. Suydam’s wife posted a large reward for any information about her missing husband. Though certain rumormongers claimed he had absconded to Europe, the general consensus was that he had met with foul play. No one, however, could come up with a likely suspect.

A few days later, however, Peter Robinson showed up at the lumberyard of a neighbor named James Edmonds, flaunting a fancy gold watch. When Edmonds expressed surprise that the carpenter owned such a costly timepiece, Robinson replied that he had recently come into a substantial sum of money—enough to pay off his mortgage to Abraham Suydam. Later that day, Edmonds relayed this conversation to his father, Jacob. His suspicions aroused, the elder Edmonds lost no time in conveying them to the mayor of New Brunswick, David W. Vail.

Accompanied by two constables, Vail proceeded directly to Robinson’s house and asked to see the mortgage document. When Robinson produced it, Vail saw at once that there was no receipt attached to it—“nothing,” as he later testified, “to show that the payment was made.” When Vail asked the perennially cash-strapped carpenter where he’d gotten the money to settle the loan, Robinson grew flustered and stammered an obviously far-fetched explanation. Taken before a magistrate for further questioning, Robinson offered up such flagrant falsehoods that he was immediately arrested on suspicion of murder.

In the meantime, three deputies, Charles Smith, Elias Thompson, and Joseph Dansberry, had begun a thorough search of Robinson’s house. Noticing a section of newly laid flooring in the front part of the basement, they tore up the planks. Underneath, they discovered “a soft spot of dirt,” as if the ground had recently been turned up. Fetching spades, they began to dig by candlelight. They had gotten to a depth of about two feet when Smith cried out that his blade had hit “something spongy.” Stripping off his coat, he knelt by the hole and stuck his hand into the muck. In an instant, he was back on his feet.

“I’d take my oath there’s a man down there,” he said.

Quickly the three men began to shovel away the remaining layer of dirt. As they did, a sickening stench wafted out of the hole. A moment later, a man’s corpse, lying facedown in the muck, came into view. Throwing down their spades, the three men carefully removed the body from its makeshift grave and placed it on one of the floorboards. When they turned it over and wiped the clotted mud from the face, they recognized him at once as Abraham Suydam.

Confronted with this overwhelming evidence of his crime, Peter Robinson blithely denied his guilt. The real murderer, he claimed, was a mysterious stranger who had come to his house on Thanksgiving Day to meet with Abraham Suydam. Leaving the two to discuss business matters in the kitchen, Robinson had gone down into the basement to fetch some firewood. When he came back upstairs a few moments later, he found the stranger standing over Suydam’s dead body. While Robinson stood paralyzed by shock, “the other man took the body down to the front basement and buried it where it was found.”

Robinson stuck to this outrageous story throughout the course of his sensational trial in March 1841. For the eight days of its duration, he observed the proceedings with an air of supreme indifference, broken only by occasional outbursts of wildly inappropriate laughter. He remained unmoved even when the inevitable guilty verdict was handed down and the presiding judge, Chief Justice Hornblower, imposed the dread sentence.

“The outraged majesty of the law demands your life, and nothing else will satisfy it,” the judge intoned. “You cannot intend to assume an idle indifference to your fate, to the solemn death that awaits you, or to the scenes of everlasting life you have to pass through. You may indeed affect an indifference to all this; you may deceive men and die as the foolish dieth. But that is the most you can do—you cannot deceive God.
His eye is upon you, as it was at that moment when you struck the fatal blow—and as it will be until the moment when the breath ceases to animate your body—and it will follow you to another world; and his wrath will rage against you through the unwasting age of eternity if his justice is not satisfied by the atoning blood of his redeeming Son.”

By the time the judge was finished, wrote the reporter for the New York Herald, “there was scarcely a dry eye in the court. Some spectators sobbed audibly, and all were deeply affected.” All, that is, except Peter Robinson, who appeared amused by the sentence. “Since I’m a carpenter,” he joked as the sheriff led him away, “I think I ought to be employed to build my own gallows and make my own coffin and give my wife the money.”

Forty-eight hours before his scheduled hanging in April, however, Robinson finally broke down and made a full confession to his spiritual advisor, Rev. H. J. Leacock, officiating minister of the Presbyterian Episcopal Church. The truth turned out to be even more awful than anyone had suspected—so shocking that Edgar Allan Poe incorporated elements of it into his classic horror story “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

A
CCORDING TO HIS
confession, Robinson, who was in dire financial straits and unable to meet his obligation to Suydam, had decided that the only way to escape his predicament was by eliminating his creditor. Calling on Suydam on the evening of December 2, he claimed to have come into a large sum of money. If Suydam came to his house the next morning with the mortgage document, Robinson would settle the debt.

When Suydam arrived on schedule, he was admitted by Robinson, who invited him to warm himself by the kitchen fire. As Suydam stepped inside and seated himself by the hearth, Robinson quietly “locked the door again without him noticing it.”

Robinson repeated that he was prepared to repay the loan but would require a written receipt. His wife, he explained, had gone out to the stationer’s for pen, ink, and paper and would return momentarily. In the meantime, he wondered if Suydam would like to see his newly dug basement. Rising, Suydam proceeded to the gloomy stairwell and began to descend, unaware that, directly behind him, Robinson had picked up a mallet.

“My intention,” Robinson said in his written confession, “was to murder him in
the basement.” At the last moment, however, his “heart failed” him. After a few minutes, the two men returned upstairs.

Finding that Robinson’s wife had still not come back, Suydam said “that he would go out and take a walk and return again.” As he stepped to the doorway, Robinson, suddenly infused with a fierce resolve, raised the mallet and delivered a savage blow to the back of the older man’s head, driving the banker to his knees. “He undertook to rise, when I struck him again on the head, and he fell over and laid still and senseless,” wrote Robinson.

Certain that Suydam was dead, Robinson hurried down into the basement and began to dig a hole. He had not gotten far, however, when it occurred to him that he ought “not leave the body upstairs.” Throwing down his spade, he returned to the kitchen, only to see Suydam “on his hands and knees, with his face and hands all bloody.”

“Oh, Peter,” moaned the banker.

Seizing the mallet, Robinson struck him another vicious blow on the head. This time, the carpenter was sure that his creditor was “perfectly dead.”

After dragging the limp body into the cellar, Robinson rifled through Suydam’s pockets and helped himself to the contents: a penknife, a wallet containing $10, coins amounting to two shillings, and a gold pocket watch. He then grabbed his spade and began to dig again, tossing the excavated dirt up over his shoulder, where much of it landed on Suydam’s body, which lay face-up on the ground beside the deepening hole.

In the dark, icy cellar, the only sounds were the rhythmic chunk of the spade as Robinson drove it again and again into the frozen, hard-packed earth and his own increasingly labored breathing.

Then he heard a muffled groan.

At the realization that Suydam was still alive beneath the blanket of dirt that now covered his face and body, Robinson was seized with horror. “I shuddered to hear him,” he wrote. Leaping from the makeshift grave, he “tied and bound” the banker, who continue to “groan so horribly” that Robinson “could not bear to hear him.” Gagging Suydam’s mouth with a balled-up rag, Robinson fled the house.

He did not return to the icy cellar until Saturday morning, three full days later. To his horror, Suydam was still breathing. Grabbing his shovel, he finished digging the grave, then rolled his victim into it alive. “I then stood upon his head to smother
him,” wrote Robinson. “He groaned so hard that I got off of him and struck him with the edge of the spade upon the head, which sank completely to the brain.”

After assuring himself that the banker was now truly dead, Robinson covered him over with dirt. Two days later, he purchased a wagonload of boards and laid a new wood floor over the grave.

When this confession appeared in the papers, Peter Robinson—already regarded as a monster—became, in the words of one observer, “more execrated” than any criminal in living memory. Attended by thousands of raucous spectators, his public hanging on Friday, April 16, 1841, was “a gala event” in New Brunswick.