The Supernatural Murders Read online

  The

  Supernatural

  Murders

  TRUE CRIME HISTORY SERIES

  Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts

  James Jessen Badal

  Tracks to Murder

  Jonathan Goodman

  Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome

  Albert Borowitz

  Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a

  Literary Phenomenon

  Robin Odell

  The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First

  Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair

  Diana Britt Franklin

  Murder on Several Occasions

  Jonathan Goodman

  The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories

  Elizabeth A. De Wolfe

  Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist

  Andrew Rose

  Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of

  Donald Ring Mellett

  Thomas Crowl

  Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon

  Albert Borowitz

  The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the

  Gilded Age

  Virginia A. McConnell

  Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones

  Jan Bondeson

  Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That

  Gripped a Nation

  James G. Hollock

  Murder and Martial Justice: Spying, “Terrorism,” and Retribution

  in Wartime America

  Meredith Lentz Adams

  The Christmas Murders: Classic True Crime Stories

  Edited by Jonathan Goodman

  The Supernatural Murders: Classic True Crime Stories

  Edited by Jonathan Goodman

  The

  Supernatural

  Murders

  Classic True Crime Stories

  Edited by

  JONATHAN

  GOODMAN

  The Kent State University Press

  Kent, Ohio

  © 2011 by the Estate of Jonathan Goodman

  All rights reserved

  First published in 1992 by

  Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd., London

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2011003224

  ISBN 978-1-60635-083-6

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The supernatural murders : classic true crime stories / edited

  by Jonathan Goodman.

  p. cm. — (True crime history series)

  ISBN 978-1-60635-083-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Occultism—History.

  2. Murder—History. I. Goodman, Jonathan.

  BF1439.S87 2011

  364.152’3—dc22

  2011003224

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

  15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jean Bloomfield,

  ‘the weird lady,’

  with love

  Contents

  Preface

  Albert Borowitz

  Bumps in the Night — an introduction

  A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day

  Ivan Butler

  The Widow of Hardscrabble

  Albert Borowitz

  Prophesies of Doom

  Bram Stoker

  The Well and the Dream

  Richard Whittington-Egan

  An Astrological Postscript

  William Henry

  Calling Madame Isherwood …

  Edmund Pearson

  A Surfeit of Spirits

  Jonathan Goodman (compiler)

  Amityville Revisited

  Jeffrey Bloomfield

  The Ghost of Sergeant Davies

  William Roughead

  Devils in the Flesh

  Rayner Heppenstall

  The Hand of God or Somebody

  Jonathan Goodman

  Defending the ‘Witch-Burners’

  Edmund Pearson

  Postscript:

  The Trial of Susanna Martin

  Cotton Mather

  The Protracted Murder of Gregory Rasputin

  Lady Lucy Wingfield

  The Gutteridge Murder

  W. Teignmouth Shore

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  Preface

  ALBERT BOROWITZ

  JONATHAN GOODMAN was determined to make The Supernatural Murders the spookiest of his true crime anthologies; he selected “accounts of killings … that were certainly or possibly sparked off by diverse beliefs about unearthly power on earth — or that were certainly or possibly brought to light by perhaps transcendent means — or that either gave rise to superstitions or legends, or acted as reminders, revivers, of old ones.” It should be noted that Goodman, ordinarily one of the most precise of crime historians, sounds consistently a note of doubt or ambiguity. “Certainly or possibly,” he suggests twice, and adds “perhaps,” emphasizing the vagueness that is often at the very core of the supernatural.

  If Goodman’s introduction did not advise them otherwise, readers who are not already familiar with his other collections might be inclined to believe that his inclusion of thirteen articles in The Supernatural Murders was intended as a reference to one of our most popular superstitions. Goodman observes that his habit of choosing thirteen cases for each anthology was actually established much earlier in his career.

  The Supernatural Murders begins with “A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day,” briefly relating the killing of a farm laborer, Charles Walton, on Valentine’s Day 1945 in an area of Warwickshire famous for witchcraft. A celebrated detective, “Fabian of the Yard” (Detective Inspector, later Superintendent Robert Fabian), believed that a farmer, Albert Potter, killed Walton when pressed for payment of a debt and then embellished his crime with “counterfeit presentments of witchery.”

  In 1924 and 1925, a serial poisoner, Martha Wise, devastated the ranks of her family in rural Medina County, near Cleveland, Ohio. My article, “The Widow of Hardscrabble,” quotes Wise as having told a reporter in a prison interview that her crimes were instigated by the devil. However, after her conviction, she blamed the poisoning scheme on her lover.

  From the pages of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, Goodman culls “Prophesies of Doom,” an account of the murderous exploits of Madame Voisin in seventeenth-century France’s Age of Arsenic. La Voisin’s originality lay in her combining skills in two specialties: fortune-telling and toxicology. She developed an uncanny knack for predicting with accuracy the longevity of unwanted husbands, and for making her prognostications come true.

  The discovery through a dream vision of the actual location of a corpse was a remarkable feature of the famous murder of Maria Marten in Polstead, England. However, since that case had been included in The Country House Murders, Goodman selected for the present volume Richard Whittington-Egan’s “The Well and the Dream,” a lesser-known example of the dreaming mind as sleuth. In 1922 Eric Tombe went missing. Night after night his sleeping mother saw her son’s dead body lying at the bottom of a well, and she brought her fears to the sympathetic attention of Superintendent Francis Carlin, one of Scotland Yard’s “Big Four.” The police dug out disused wells at the burnt farmhouse of Eric Tombe’s crooked partner, Ernest Dyer, and confirmed the accuracy of Mrs. Tombe’s dreams by finding her son’s body. Since Dyer had previously been killed in an arrest for an unrelated crime, the murder case remains unsolved. Goodman adds “An Astrological Postscript,” by William Henry, who finds Dyer’s guilt consistent with the planets.

  One of
America’s most celebrated true crime writers of the twentieth century, Edmund Pearson, is represented by two short articles in contrasting moods. “Calling Madame Isherwood …” recalls a moment of priceless wit in a prosecutor’s cross-examination of a practicing medium who had taken the stand, so she said, only after being authorized to do so by the spirit of a murder victim. “What kind of a spirit was it?” the prosecutor asked. “A plump spirit, above five feet high?” The argument of Pearson’s second piece, “Defending the ‘Witch-Burners,’“ is advanced in earnest — that “we cannot afford to say much about the Salem witches if we chance to live where the custom of lynching Negroes, often innocent Negroes, is extenuated today.” (Goodman appends Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witchcraft trial of Susanna Martin.)

  Goodman contributes two excellent pieces to the collection. The first, “A Surfeit of Spirits,” is his compilation of records and press clippings concerning an epidemic of ghost sightings in early nineteenth-century Hammersmith that terminated in a homicide. Francis Smith, in nocturnal pursuit of a reported spectre, shot to death the white-clad Thomas Milyard, who failed to respond when challenged. After he was convicted of murder, Smith’s death sentence was commuted to a year’s imprisonment. Goodman supplies a happy, though fictional, ending.

  A second article by Goodman, “The Hand of God or Somebody,” recalls hangings that went awry, including two failed attempts to execute John Lee. The hangman, James Berry, blamed deficient ironwork catches of the trapdoors, but nonconforming preachers sermonized that God had intervened to spare Lee. Jonathan Goodman offers still another hypothesis: “The ‘Hand of God’ theory seems less credible than a ‘Hand of Satan’ one.”

  In “Amityville Revisited” Jeffrey Bloomfield expresses outrage that the site of a real horror is now better known for the dubious account of subsequent visitations by poltergeists and demons. In December 1975, Ronnie DeFeo Jr. was sentenced to life imprisonment after conviction for murdering his parents and four siblings in the family’s residence. Bloomfield notes that following the vacation of the haunted premises by the Lutzes, whose afflictions by evil spirits were detailed in The Amityville Horror, “the house has been inhabited by an apparently still-happy family.” The new owner, James Cromarty, commented: “Nothing weird ever happened except for people coming by because of the book and the movie.” On May 24, 2010, Newsday reported that the house was back on the market, listed at $1.15 million.

  The art of William Roughead, master of Scottish crime history, is exemplified in the collection by his early gem, “The Ghost of Sergeant Davies.” Set in desolate stretches of the Highlands after the Jacobite Rising of 1745, the murder of Davies was followed by a farcical trial in which hearsay testimony of the victim’s ghost was admitted. Roughead notes that the Scots apparition spoke in Gaelic, “which would seem to be an appropriate medium of communication but for the fact that the soldier [Davies], an Englishman, while in the flesh had no knowledge of that tongue.”

  In a sensational French trial of 1956, Denise Labbé and her lover, Jacques Algarron, were sentenced to long prison terms after Denise drowned her little daughter Catherine in a vessel for washing clothes. In Rayner Heppenstall’s brief commentary, “Devils in the Flesh,” Satan’s trace is omnipresent. Algarron was charged under a statute directed against those who by “machinations or culpable artifices … shall have provoked the act.” Even a devil’s disciple participated in the trial as Denise’s counsel, Maître Maurice Garçon, a member of the Académie Française, who was an expert on demonology.

  Lady Lucy Wingfield’s letter to her daughter describing what Goodman calls “The Protracted Murder of Gregory Rasputin” testifies that the “Satanic Monk” had uncanny powers of magnetism and survival. Lady Wingfield relates that while Prince Felix Yousoupoff lay on a sofa meditating Rasputin’s assassination, the monk was able to cause “streams of fire” to run through the prince’s body. On the evening of his murder, Rasputin showed a superhuman resistance to poison and gunfire before his corpse was dumped into the River Neva.

  The last entry in The Supernatural Murders is W. Teignmouth Shore’s “The Gutteridge Murder,” which recounts in an unadorned style the slaying of a police constable by car thieves Browne and Kennedy. This is a case in which I had never taken much interest until I read Jonathan Goodman’s amusing postscript that associates the crime with a durable folk belief. It would be another crime to reveal more to the reader in advance.

  Other books by Jonathan Goodman

  published by The Kent State University Press

  Bloody Versicles: The Rhymes of Crime

  The Christmas Murders

  Murder on Several Occasions

  The Passing of Starr Faithfull

  Tracks to Murder

  Bumps in the Night

  I met Murder on the way –

  He had a mask like Castlereagh:

  Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

  Seven bloodhounds followed him:

  All were fat; and well they might

  Be in admirable plight,

  For one by one, and two by two,

  He tossed them human hearts to chew.

  THOUGH I DOUBT that Shelley intended supernatural significance in those stanzas of The Masque of Anarchy, no matter: they will, at least as nicely as any other sentence, frame your mind for the following accounts of killings (quite legal, some of them) that were certainly or possibly sparked off by diverse beliefs about unearthly power on earth – or that were certainly or possibly brought to light by perhaps transcendent means – or that either gave rise to superstitions or legends, or acted as reminders, revivers, of old ones.

  There are thirteen accounts. Anybody at once assuming that that number was chosen especially for this collection, simply because of the collection’s title, is wrong. This is the tenth volume of a series, and ever since the fourth volume, each of them has contained thirteen accounts. (And at last I have a cue to quote the good – is it anonymous? – comment: ‘There is no more brutal murder than the killing of a fine theory with a hard fact.’ And I can tell you something that a friend, Colin Dexter, has told me: that there is a word, ‘triskaidekaphobia’, for fear of the number thirteen. And I have an excuse for recalling Noel Coward’s remark that although he was doggedly unsuperstitious, he drew the line at sleeping thirteen to a bed.)

  Because of the sub-subject of this collection, almost all of the accounts in it require the reader to make assumptions ‘based’ on still slighter evidence than that misleading to the assumption I mentioned a moment ago – and, nearly always, those assumptions cannot be proved right or wrong; not even as definite maybes. Certain ‘true’-crime writers – those who are prepared to concoct facts in aid of assumptions they made long before the facts – will no doubt sigh at the thought of how much easier, how principled, their writing lives would be if only all criminal cases allowed the assumptive licence of these.

  The collection is not definitive. I’m not sure how incomplete it is; but I suppose that the most noticeable omission is The Murder of Maria Marten (said to have been brought to light, in the Red Barn at Polstead, by a dream), which is not here because I included an account of it in an earlier volume, The Country House Murders. If I had not also included in that collection an account of The Rose Harsent Murder Case at Peasenhall, not far from Polstead, I might, just might, have considered it for this one – on the tenuous ground of a legend (not unlike a tale told near the end of ‘A Surfeit of Spirits’, page 78) that, simply because the ambiguous Rose was cut down a little before, or during, or soon after a thunderstorm, every seven years ever since (no one can explain why seven), a thunderstorm breaks out over Peasenhall, though the weather is clement elsewhere in Suffolk.

  Many callings have particular superstitions. (Why, I shouldn’t be surprised if some ‘exact’ sciences have each gathered a sheepish few, though possible ill-effects of a pooh-poohing of them will be sighed aside as instances of Murphy’s Law – or if even computer-dependent activities have co
llected some, possible ill-effects of a pooh-poohing of them of course reported acronymically: as MOUSES, perhaps, standing for Manifestations of Unbelievably Silly ErrorS.) I cannot tell whether the criminal calling still has as many superstitions as was once so – or, supposing that there are some, what they are, let alone whether they all have a pedigree or are a mixture of old and new ones. Only a day or so ago, when I was searching for an article, nothing to do with the supernatural, in volumes of a part-work, Famous Crimes, that was published circa 1902, I came across a filler headed ‘Charms Criminals Carry’. (Serendipity, I know; and I know the saying that ‘chance favours the prepared mind’ – but fortuitous findings of that sort, not at all uncommon in my experience, can be viewed as evidence, nothing like proof, of what has been called ‘the luring power of sympathetic magic’.) Here are extracts from the found – or finding – filler:

  Those who have made a study of criminals assure us that no body of people believe so much in Fate and its inscrutable decrees, as well as in the power of certain charms to alter destinies, as the habitual offenders.

  Many a burglar has been turned from the ‘crib’ which he intended to crack because a bat has flown past him while he was on the way to the scene of operations. Poachers frequently carry the small roots of one of the polypodia ferns which grow in the form of tiny hands, and are known among them as ‘St John’s Hands’, believing that thereby they ensure success in their depredations and immunity from capture.

  From ancient times, peculiar powers have been ascribed to the mandrake, but it will probably be news to our readers to learn that to have a piece of this root in one’s pocket is the first step towards becoming a skilful lock-picker, and should be possessed by all thieves who value their profession. The three-card-trick man and the thimble-rigger pin their faiths respectively on the dried heart of a bat and on a broken button, while the horse-stealer carries a small piece of milt [the roe of a male fish], which is supposed to prevent the stolen animal from whinnying.