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114 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
It was revealed that this man had “cased his joint” much in
the same manner in which a bank robber or burglar will look
over the field, preparatory to his depredations. A graduate of
jails and reform schools, he had wandered about with the idea
of ingratiating himself into a family where his quick wit, in-
telligence and ability might serve him in eventually taking
over the place, either by management or inheritance. He had
heard of the Grimm family and of the father’s illness. He had
become acquainted with one of the younger sons and through
him had made the first advances. From this he graduated to a po-
sition in which he was able to dominate the household, to say
nothing of using the thirteen-year-old daughter as 2 concubine
—a situation which led to a double killing. j
Here was a case in which a man arrived from nowhere, tell-
ing nothing about himself, using an alias and concealing the
fact that he was a dangerous jailbird. This occurred simply be-
cause no one took the slightest pains to inquire into his past.
The same sort of thing has happened in a hundred other rural
communities. As for the ability of a wanderer to indulge in a
country-wide life of crime, there is the story of Earl Young,
which rather makes the old boys of four or five years ago, such
as Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Harvey Bailey and other mem-
bers of the fifty-mile-an-hour era, seem decrepit indeed. Earl
Young, who never got his name on the national front pages,
created more havoc in a few months than John Dillinger
achieved in an entire lifetime.
He had been a criminal since he was sixteen, and as such had
spent much time in educational institutions, such as “correctional
homes” and reformatories. The extent of his record before he
entered these places is, of course, not known, because the
juvenile court, like the dead, tells no tales.
Along about May a year ago, Earl Young tired of serving a
sentence in the Lebanon, Pennsylvania, jail where he had been
incarcerated for robbery and auto theft. He was twenty-five
years old, husky, active, and thoroughly educated in perversion
DEATH AT THE TAVERN 115
by his various incarcerations. He decided to escape, and once
this decision was reached, was not long in acting upon it.
The records do not state his method of departure, but, judging
from recent reports on county jails, with emphasis on those in
Pennsylvania, the leaving required neither a great amount of
courage — nor resourcefulness.
Once out, Earl Young started almost immediately to gratify
long-denied desires. He liked money — and stole to get it. He
liked automobiles and took them when he chose. He liked
women, but only when the difficulty of their taking appeased
sadistic instincts developed in the schools of perversion which
most “reformatories” provide.
There soon were numerous reports of attacks upon women in
various communities which, it has been determined since, FE arl
Young visited. Many of these attacks were at night, hence the
man could not be identified, nor a description given. However,
they conformed to a pattern, and that pattern was Earl Young’s
— abduction, vilification, and attack which sometime: was
satiated with cruelty, at other times only completed with the
sexual act during unconsciousness or after death.
In Hutchinson, Kansas, he seized a young couple in a car,
transported them to a lonely place, tied the man to a tree, led the
girl away, beat her into unconsciousness and raped her. The
next time he could be described sufficiently to be recognized
was in Louisville, Kentucky, where he again tied an escort to
a tree, kidnapped the girl, took her on what she described as a
wild ride into Indiana and there, after other indignities, left her
tied to a tree. Following this, there was a hiatus, in which there
were coincident reports of holdups, car robberies and assaulted
women, but in which identifications were lacking until the man
reached Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where he attacked a girl in
the usual sadistic manner, beating, cursing and kicking her.
Another met the same fate in Rochester, Minnesota, while in
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he badly injured one girl and beat
another to death, then raped her.
ie Dae HM eee
Pe es
2 ate, tai Ut come ecm tie:
112 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
the record of the ordinary, run-of-the-mine criminal who de-
cides to put his field of crime upon a state-to-state basis. It is
extremely doubtful if Dillinger, even in his wildest moments,
could concoct infractions that would even approach those of
some of our present-day wanderers. After all, Dillinger was a
businessman; he killed because that was a part of his work in
robbing banks. The wandering killer of today does so because
often he has lost his sense of balance. He has come to believe
that the world owes him not only a living, but anything
else he covets, and that anyone who stands in the path of
such desires should_be mowed down in the most cold-blooded
manner possible. {For instance, there was the pleasant young
fellow named Clifford Hawkins, who wandered onto a farm
near Faber Ferry, Washington, and by his geniality, his ap-
parent eagerness to work, his oft-expressed joy over having
found a snug harbor, soon made himself practically a mem-
ber of the family.
This farm was peopled by the large family of Roy Grimm,
who had been ill for some time, and included among other chil-
dren Ernest Grimm, twenty-six years old, his brother Floyd,
twenty-one, and 2 daughter, Edith, who was thirteen. Haw-
kins had come there in 1936 and, being 2 good manager, speed-
ily had taken a position of command in the running of the
farm.
Time passed to last year. A sheriff, on a routine trip into the
neighborhood, heard rumors that one of the Grimm boys had
stolen an electric generator. The officer searched the farm and
found the piece of machinery, then asked for Floyd, who was
suspected of having taken it. Hawkins answered:
“He’s gone to California. Ernest sent for him. Got a job
down there for him.”
“How long has Ernest been gone?”
“About three months.”
“And Floyd... 2?”
‘He left as soon as Ernest could send for him.’
3
DEATH AT THE TAVERN 113
The sheriff questioned the mother:
“Have you heard from either of your boys?”
“Not a line, since they left.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
“No,” she said, voicing the parental philosophy which makes
disappearance on the road such an easy matter, “you know
how boys are nowadays. They just decided to pick up and go,
I guess; they didn’t even say anything to me about it and they
haven’t written since. Maybe they figure on coming back
soon. Anyway, they must be all right, or ’'d hear from them.”
Just how “‘all right” they were soon became apparent when
the search for Floyd and Emest Grimm truly began. Neign-
bors of the Grimm family in the sparsely settled district gos-
: siped to the effect that Ernest and Floyd might not have de-
parted voluntarily. May
“Maybe something happened to them,” one said. “Maybe
they found out what has been going on between that new fart
hand and that thirteen-year-old girl. And maybe the farm-
hand did something to keep their mouths shut.”
The girl, it seems, had talked to classmates in school, and
they had carried to their homes the unpieasant story, to be-
come an exciting piece of rural gossip. Officers questioned the
girl, and got nothing. Then they concealed themselves at the
farm, watched Hawkins and the girl until they were able to
ee oe eee
catch them in a status of intimacy and took them both into
the county seat for questioning. There the girl confessed that
Clifford Hawkins, the twenty-five-year-old wanderer, had
killed her two brothers, shooting them down from behind
with a rifle, because they had learned of the illicit relation-
ship. This done, Hawkins had buried the bodies on the farm,
and told the rest of the family that the boys had gone to Cali-
fornia. ee"
The man pleaded guilty to a charge of statutory rape waicn,
in Washington, can carry a sentence of life imprisonment. Mur-
der charges, resulting in a life sentence, also were filed.
22 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
and Mike Murphy easy to look upon: a couple of kids set to
die, because they too had been nervous and therefore had killed,
during a Brooklyn holdup.
One may find the same picture in the death cells of other
prisons, and afterward, go away, wondering what is wrong,
what dangerous underlying condition exists to force the maj-
esty of The Law to protect itself by sending children to
death. Boys, for instance, like eighteen-year-old Irwin Gable,
gasping out his life on a hospital cot, while his fingerprints were
taken for the police records. Irwin had led a baby-bandit gang
of four others, and resisted when police had interfered.
“We've got to kill ’em,” said a cop bluntly, “or they'll kill
us. Punk kids are dangerous.”
Most cases of this kind have their inception in the desire to
obtain money, often in pitifully small amounts and usually
to be spent on girls. Technically such acts are called “crimes
against property.” Murder arrives as an unlooked-for after-
math. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one
half of all persons arrested for the crimes of burglary, larceny,
embezzlement and fraud, forgery and arson, in 1938 were less
than twenty-five years old — again an increase over the pre-
vious year. And nearly a third of this type of criminal were
less than twenty-one. Moreover statistics are kind to youth, for
embezzlement and fraud pull down the average, since they are
crimes necessarily of an adult nature, and less than six per
cent of them are committed by young persons. Arson also leans
to an older age, as well as forgery and counterfeiting. But if
your car is stolen, if your house is robbed, or you are stuck up
at the point of a gun in your store, it is more than a sixty-forty
bet that the perpetrator will be all the more dangerous because
of his lack of balance, for he will be an erratic, volatile, minia-
ture thinker of less than twenty-one. And in almost every case,
he will threaten your life, your well-being and your security
for some cause which has to do with a girl. As for the crime
/ of rape, youth under twenty-one is responsible for nearly a
PROHIBITION’S CHILDREN 23
fourth of all cases, the peaks of infraction occurring at the
ages of nineteen and twenty.
The foregoing figures are based by the FBI on case-records
from law-enforcement bodies, and the FBI must depend on
these reports for its statistics. However, there is a larger area
of crime activity from which such officers are literally barred.
This is presided over by an institution great in theory but a
failure as a cure-all for youthful crime. Here records for public
consumption rarely exist, nevertheless there can be no accurate
picture of American crime without them. This field of semi-
secrecy is the juvenile court, which, to quote Homer Cum-
mings, former Attorney General of the United States, has
“collapsed as a crime-preventive cure-all.” Moreover, it has
collapsed to equal flatness as a barricade against the transition of
youthful crime into adult offenses. A stark picture of this is
given in the energetic study by Eleanor T. and Sheldon Glueck
of Harvard University into the workings of what has been re-
garded as about the most perfectly equipped juvenile court in
America. This is the one now presided over in Boston by Judge
John F. Perkins, outstanding everywhere for his earnest and
sensible approach to the delicate job of attempting to salvage
youth. Moreover, the Boston Juvenile Court has had 2 type of
assistance denied the average city, in a finely equipped clinical
ally, the Judge Baker Guidance Center. What Professor and
Doctor Glueck found in their studies was social dynamite,
placed between book covers and titled One Thousand Juvenile
Delinquents. It revealed that the juvenile court, no matter
how eager or well administered, is merely a palliative and not
a cure. For of the total of one thousand boys studied during a
five-year post-treatment period, eighty per cent continued in
determined fashion along a life of crime. Arrests, in fact, av-
eraged 3.6 for each boy, and these were not for mere childish
pranks. Fully two thirds of the group whose careers admitte
of close study were engaged in the repeated commission of fel-
onies! Beyond this are the fingerprint records of the Federal
20 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
eighteen months; the Children’s Bureau of the United States
Department of Labor reports an annual increase of 11 per cent
based on data from twenty-eight courts in seventeen cities and
the District of Columbia, and this is only a drop in the bucket
when all of the United States ss concerned. That child-crime
is a serious indication of future adult infraction is evidenced
by the fact that a majority of our really desperate criminals,
the kidnappers, the high-powered robbers, multiple murderers
and the like, have had a background of consistent law viola-
tion during youth, going from incorrigibility to desperate
activities after their first reformatory sentence, from which
time they begin to appear in the news columns.
These figures mean qiso that the majority of cases concern
boys, since the average juvenile court does everything in its
power to keep 2 girl’s name off the records. However, for almost
every boy in crime, there is a quality of feminine responsibility
whether the girl ever appeared in the case or not. The almost
unfailing motivation of crime in youth is likewise sex in youth.
A prisoner’s stock diagnosis of his past usually begins with:
“Oh, I got along about that age when I began locking at
the girls.”
Thus as more boys are headed toward truly dangerous lives
of crime, more girls are pointed along a road which presages
no good for society: to become prostitutes, drug addicts, per-
verts, consorts of dangerous men. It means more Eddies and
more Gracies, for after all, their case was not an unusual one,
but merely a disheartening repetition of thousands of others.
One does not need to seek records in support of this contention;
typical cases can be recited offhand: —
One remembers, for instance, the gaunt face of a boy, rub-
bing at his neck as he turned away from his head-tilted po-
sition before the judge's bench in Cincinnati, then dazedly star-
ing about him as a court officer took his arm to lead him away.
He was fifteen years old, and there drummed in his brain that
he had just been sentenced to prison — for the murder of a
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PROHIBITION’S CHILDREN 21
six-year-old girl. This gives way to the weak grins of the three
young waitresses, arrested in Los Angeles on a charge which,
even ten years ago, was reserved for the lowest of prostitutes:
the “rolling” or robbing of a man with whom they had been in
company, on their alleged promise of sexual intercourse. Then
there is a white-faced boy, sixteen years old, caught as he left
a burglarized residence, and swallowing nervously as he told re-
porters that he guessed he’d get through “it” somehow. “It”
was a sentence of from ten to twenty years for a burglary which
had netted him exactly fifty-four cents. :
Such things are typical, and they are portentous. One does
not like to think of the wastage of human life involved in the
trio of three boys sent last year to prison in lowa. One of them
eighteen, had hated his father, and for good reason. He had eS
moned two pals of about the same age. They had gotten drunk
together. Liquor had created cunning. The boy had promised his
comrades fifty dollars if they would help him kill the father
money which, it developed, was not forthcoming. Thus, on ;
mere promise, two boys aided a third in a patritide: Now one
is under sentence of twenty years. The others have been given
life sentences. As the rules of parole exist today, all of them will
be out in 2 minimum of forty-four months and a maximum of
seven years. Statistics prove that at least one, and perhaps two
will become dangerous men, committing crime after crime, un a
death checks them off the list. oa
igh Na emaier ates renee eo
: py sight, especially when
one views the youthful faces there, all with a wary eye toward
the little door which leads to the electric chairf Such persons,
for instance, as seventeen-year-old Joe Healy, who had tried
to beat life’s rap by marrying the girl, and then, with a baby
approaching, had become desperate. Nervous, shaky, uncertain,
he had attempted the holdup of a store run by an aged woman
in Greenwich Village, and killed her when he became fright-
ened at her outcries. Nor are such prisoners as Jimmy Mooney
~
Index to pertinent excerpts from DESIGNS IN SCARLET, by Courtney Ryley Cooper;
1)
2)
3)
li)
5)
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939.
Clifford HAWKINS, hanged Washington State, on Fybruary 23, 1938e.ee112=-11h,
Floyd Nelson HARVEY, electrocuted, Georgia, on June 23, 1939 eccceeell9-121,
Calvin TATE and Willard HALL, Electrocuted, Kentucky, on Jan. 17,
1936.6 @eee 80 ccecudite
Lester BROCKELHURST, Electrocuted, Arkansas, on March 18, 1938...0e172=176.
Harry POWERS, Hanged, West Virginia, on March 18, 1932eccccccecesseccomeche
DESIGNS
/ IN SCARLET
” COOPER eee
noopoonne BY COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER
ENEMIES |
LE
LET
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
1939
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176 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
the driver to stop. He did so. Bernice then got out of the car.
Brockelhurst then also ordered the driver out; but he grabbed
for the gun, and was killed.
According to Brockelhurst, this girl now showed how will-
ing she was to help her poor boy friend who was about to be-
come a father. While the blood was still spurting from the
dying victim’s wounds, Brockelhurst said that she went through
the man’s pockets, extracting his possessions. Then, according to
her comrade, she helped her lover throw the body into the ton-
neau, where they covered it with a coat until they could push it
out into a ditch.
Powers of observation being what they are, this pair was
enabled to drive on in the bloody car, to pawn the dead man’s
watch for toll fare at a bridge leading into Memphis, and sell a
rear tire for five dollars. They stopped at innumerable tourist
camps. Lester held up several stores. Finally they wandered to
Pittsburgh without even a change of license plates, visited an
uncle in Pennsylvania, and at last got to Poughkeepsie, New
York, where the vigilant New York State Police added to its
record for efficiency by picking up this murderer who had lit-
erally strolled without annoyance from Memphis, Tennessee.
They were sent back to Little Rock, where the girl viewed
the future with the confidence which women hangers-on of
crime usually possess. As a general rule they need only say that
they just didn’t notice what their husbands or consorts were
doing. And if they are about to give birth to a murderer's brat,
then, indeed, all is forgiven. For Lester, however, things were
different. Recently, Arkansas officials allowed him to view the
electric chair in the state prison. Then they strapped him in
it and turned on the current. The lax type of tourist camp is the
loser thereby, but society is better off. It will be even more
fortunate when there is loud and continued insistence upon the
wiping out of a large part of the mushroom growth of Kozy
Kabins which have become a first cousin to prostitution, a haven
for promiscuity and an ally of dangerous crime throughout
America.
*
CHAPTER TEN
ARE YOU LONELY?
I RAN into Johnny the Glib one day early last spring in Miami.
He was dressed even more suavely than usual and I noticed that
he was smoking what he called a “half-clam torch,” Johnay
being the kind who would thus describe a fifty-cent cigar.
His hat was on the back of his head, his torch tilted from a
corner of his mouth, his cold blue eyes calmly surveying the
traffic of Biscayne Boulevard as he rocked contentedly on heel
and toe. He did not turn effusively at my approach, but moved
only his eyes to view me, a habit resultant from penitentiary
days. Evidently Johany was taking a vacation from acquired
habits of conduct. He could be most urbane when he chose,
with an excellent flow of grammatically pure conversation
gleaned from years of reading in prison libraries. But, of course,
that was when he was working. Otherwise he loved to chew
English into small bits.
“Nobody’s tailing you, Johnny!” I said. “Swing around.”
“Was I pulling that stir-house stuff?” he asked with a grin.
“Jeez, it gets me sore to drop back into that. Reason I’ve gone
in for see-gars; if I’m smoking cigarettes, sure as hell, PU cup
my hand over the butt; you’d think Pd just ducked out on a
cell-block screw and was hiding around the corner of the Mess
Hall, taking a drag and being afraid I’d be sent to solitary for
doing it. Don’t them things hang on?” .
“Them things? Evidently you're not working now.
“No,” he puffed contentedly, “taking a little rest. Just fin-
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174 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
camp just outside the city — tourist camps had been the stop-
ping place of this murderer and his girl on the entire journey.
As he expressed it:
“You don’t have to worry about the police at a tourist camp.
They never seem to go there.”
Salt Lake City was only thirty miles away and could be reached
on two gallons of gas, which would have cost less than his bill at
the tourist camp; nevertheless, Brockelhurst held up a filling
station, engaged in a shooting affray, and then hurried back to
his girl. Several days later, he held up another service station,
and with one hundred dollars in his pocket, forgot all about the
relatives in Salt Lake City. Instead, the pair headed for Dallas,
Texas, where they visited with friends, whom they had not
seen in a long while.
After a time, however, this became tiresome. Brockelhurst
put his girl in the car and they began to drive about the city.
The man saw an old woman sitting on the steps of a warehouse
counting some bills. Immediately he leaped from the car and
ran toward her, pointing his gun and demanding that she give
him the money. She screamed, and, with that, Bernice jumped
from the car and ran into hiding, to wait until the shooting
was over.
However, Brockelhurst did not slay the old woman. A
passer-by intervened and chased Brockelhurst when the robber-
murderer jumped into his car for a getaway. So Brockelhurst
killed him, hurried back, picked up his girl and held a con-
sultation with her as to what should be done.
In the storybooks, here would have been the big moment.
The girl would have told this cheap rat that he had killed one
person too many, and that she never wanted to see him again.
That doesn’t work in real life. Bernice herself explained the
reasons for her loyalty in a statement made after the arrest of
her killer-comrade:
“Why, I just couldn’r leave Lester. He needed me. He was
the father of my unborn child!”
5 etn RS SE SR els PR BEE ls Pi aS Th ARR RO Sly
A CABIN FOR THE NIGHT 175
So, she stuck right with Lester while the murderer ran the
car into a ditch and abandoned it. With him she threw away
all belongings which might be identified. Even the gun was
left in the car, but Lester bought a new one.
So now, with a gun in his pocket, a murder-itch on his trig-
ger finger, and a sad-faced pregnant girl to aid him as a road-
side lure, Lester Brockelhurst became a hitchhiker. This man-
and-wife-beside-the-road is a racket; any officer will denounce
it vociferously. Yet it is the most successful of hitchhiking
schemes. More men and wives are traveling the roads free who
mever even saw a wedding ceremony than could be packed
into Madison Square Garden. And the more adept they are,
the more forlorn they appear, the more they indulge in the
beside-the-road-at-twilight method of travel. The routine is to
sleep and loll about most of the day at some tourist camp, then
late in the afternoon force themselves to walk far enough away
to see an approaching motorist. They do their riding, their
robbing, their begging or their arrangements for prostitution
in the cool of the evening, when conditions are pleasant, the
roadside beautiful and the driver more easily lulled. The term
prostitution is used advisedly; more than one pimp lives these
days by hitchhiking methods. His gir! sits in the front seat and
if she can find a driver who is fool enough to listen to her,
“consents” to ditch her husband at the first tourist camp and
spend the night with her new love. Thereupon she gets him
drunk, robs him, joins her pimp, sleeps away the day, and the
next evening, when the shadows are long and persons beside
the road seem very lonely, they are out again, waiting for a
new sucker.
Lester and Bernice got along very nicely at gaining free rides.
They were carried by obliging motorists into Little Rock,
Arkansas, where they tired of not having a car of their own.
So they hitched a ride with a Little Rock man bound for Mem-
phis, Bernice sitting with the driver, Brockelhurst in the rear
seat. Five miles out of town, Lester pulled his gun and ordered
ranma. .
arr ead as ce
222 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
quainted and matrimonial bureaus. Practically all these infrac-
tions have their inception in interstate commerce.
There was the case of Carroll Rablen and his wife Eva, whom
he had brought to the old lode-minin g town of Tuttletown, from
Texas, after a period of wooing through a matrimonial agency.
Apparently she loved him greatly. But the love seemed to dwindle
when she learned that he was about to allow a three-thousand-
dollar insurance policy to lapse. On the very day she discovered
this fact, Eva Rablen hurried out and bought a bottle of strych-
nine. Four days before the time when the policy would be-
come useless, she gave her husband a very bitter cup of coffee.
Carroll Rablen died. Eva was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Another score was marked up for marriage and murder by mail.
Again, there was the case of Harry Powers, who played the
marriage markets with malice aforethought. He invaded a
little town in West Virginia, as the mail-order husband of
a young woman who owned a small store. One wife, however,
was not enough. Powers immediately assumed a new role. In
this, he was Cornelius O. Pierson and as such he joined numerous
matrimonial agencies, with a special post-office lockbox in which
to receive his heavy mail. Meanwhile, he built a sound-proof,
windowless garage on his wife’s farm, some distance from the
town.
Time passed. One day, a former boarder at the home of Mrs.
Asta Buick Eicher, a fifty-year-old woman with three children,
in an Illinois town, returned to his old abiding place. There was
cause for this. Mrs. Eicher had told him she could not keep
boarders any more because she was going to marry a fine man
whom she had met through a get-acquainted organization. The
husband-to-be didn’t like boarders, it seemed. The roomer had
moved; today he had returned for some tools he had left in the
basement.
He rang the doorbell assiduously, without response. There-
upon, deciding that Mrs. Eicher had gone out for a while, taking
the children with her, the boarder merely went around the house,
MURDER BY MAIL 223
down into the basement, and got his tools. But as he did so, he
heard the sound of stealthy steps above him.
“Burglars!” he decided. Leaving the basement quietly, he hur-
ried for the nearest telephone and called the police. Responding
officers found a stocky man of about forty-five in the house,
busily moving out the furniture. He greeted the police cheer-
fully. |
“Nothing wrong about this,” he said nonchalantly. “My name
is Cornelius O. Pierson. Iam agent for Mrs. Eicher, who has gone
to Colorado with her children.”
“Can you produce any evidence of that?”
“Why, of course. Here is Mrs. Eicher’s power of attorney for
me to transact her business. And if you will examine the records,
you will see that I have just paid up the back interest on the
mortgage on this place as well as the back taxes. Look it up.”
“We'll do that. In the meantime, you come down to police
headquarters tomorrow morning. By that time, we will have
checked up on your story.”
The police did check on the man’s assertions concerning the
mortgage interest and back taxes, finding them correct. Every-
thing was set to give Cornelius O. Pierson a clean bill of health
when he reported. But Pierson, otherwise Powers, made his own
contribution to law enforcement by not appearing. This caused
suspicion.
Now the police became active. They searched the house and
found that Mrs. Eicher had been a devotee of the idea of mar-
riage by mail. They discovered also a number of letters from
Cornelius O. Pierson, of West Virginia. So they arrested Pierson-
Powers and “grilled” him. It must have been rather warm grill-
ing. A photograph of Powers taken immediately afterward re-
vealed that he must have slipped on the ice of a July day. Both
eyes were blacked; his face, in fact, had the appearance of a badly
mauled man.
His was a deserving case, however. What he had told during
that grilling sent officers to the Powell farm, and the windowless
whnithe
-- Sap at oe soiree
RETR Nien aia te eat am
224 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
garage, where investigation into a newly-filled trench brought
forth the bodies of Mrs. Eicher and her three children — plus
that of a woman who had not previously appeared in the murder
picture. This was an out-of-the-state bride who had rebelled
against her first adventure in a marriage bureau. On this primary
venture, she had discovered her husband to be a bigamist. So
she had tried again and gotten a degenerate murderer, for the
autopsies showed that Harry Powers possessed necrophiliac
tendencies, or the desire to obtain sexual satisfaction by con-
tact with the dead! He was executed. }
There is no desire to detail at length the murders and degen-
eracies which have resulted from marriage-by-mail; too many
such cases exist. However, it is of more than ordinary interest
that in at least four cases, the trail of wholesale killing has lasted
over a number of years without the slightest interference from
law enforcement A historic instance arose in 1929, when the
body of a woman, charred by gasoline flames, was found on a
highway near Crawford, New Jersey. Because one foot was
slightly deformed, identification was comparatively easy. She
had been a love-bureau addict of Greenville, Pennsylvania, who
had left home a short time before. The tracing of letters found
in her effects led to an allegedly respectable physician of New
Brunswick. And when they began to dig into this doctor’s
past... 6%
For more than forty years, this sadist had devoted himself to
the amusement of killing mail-order brides. Starting as a forger
in California, he had been paroled from a penitentiary sentence
after which he had gone East, obtained a job in an asylum where
he spent his official hours in selling narcotics to the inmates, and
his play-time in meeting women by mail, incidentally murdering
several. He was imprisoned for the narcotics violations; coin-
cidentally, the mysterious discovery of mutilated bodies of dead
women ceased, although, evidently, nobody took the trouble to
investigate a possibility that the physician might have been
concerned. This was in spite of the fact that the good doctor
MURDER BY MAIL 225
was known to have been an enthusiastic student of a type of
demon-worship which necessitated a ritual of cannibalism and
.the drinking of human blood. Since the hearts had been torn
out of the bodies of the dead women, and their veins drained of
blood, it would seem that someone might have established a
connection between blood-rituals and blood-letting. But nobody
did.
The doctor got out of Sing Sing where he had been in-
carcerated. He went to New Brunswick and immediately re-
newed his enthusiasm for mail-order brides. Only the fact that
he grew careless brought about his prosecution when he failed
to sufficiently destroy his last victim. Upon arrest he made quite
an effort to remember how many women he had married and
killed, but the best he could do was to say that there were a
lot of them. Evidently this was so, since officers from six states
awaited the outcome of his trial so that, in the event of failure to
convict, he could be taken elsewhere for prosecution. However,
the prisoner remained in New Jersey, a guest of the electric
chair. |
The marriage-bureau case of Jesse Tatum, a farmer, patent-
medicine seller and ardent church-goer of Taylor, Mississippi, is
an excellent example of how often one can get away wich mur-
der in the small community. Jesse had a wooden leg. One night,
yowling loudly, he ran to neighbors following a shotgun blast,
and announced that a terrible thing had happened. As he was
getting out of his automobile with a shotgun in his hand, he
had tripped over his wooden leg and inadvertently pulled the
trigger of the gun, thus blasting the head off his middle-aged
wife who had preceded him. Everyone sympathized with Jesse,
while Tatum himself pocketed the proceeds of the $1000 in-
surance policy.
Evidently, however, that wasn’t enough money, for a short
time afterward, Tatum’s house burned, and Tatum got more
insurance. There is no record of an investigation having been
made for evidences of incendiarism. Now Jesse was comparatively
148 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
sufficient for at least two persons if smoked according to the
rules, the picture changes completely. Police insist, and have a
basis of proof from the confessions of peddlers, that most of this
money was made up from the dimes and quarters of boys and
girls of high-school age. And, certainly; marihuana was blamed
for one of the most wanton murders Louisville has known in
the last five years. |
[ In this crime, twenty-year-old Calvin Tate, with three ac-
complices, attempted to hold up a filling station operated by an
elderly man. Their plans failed, 2 boy pulled a gun and the
station owner was killed.
In their rush for freedom, they killed two other men, neither
of whom attempted to halt them. The first was standing on 2
corner outside the station waiting for a bus. The second, at-
tracted by the shots, was walking in his front yard when Tate
and the only other gunman in the quartet, Willard Hall, ran
past.
Captured, Tate admitted being at the station with Hall dur-
ing the holdup but said he was “muggle-headed” at the time.
This was his defense to police. It wasn’t enough and a jury sent
him, with Hall, to the electric chair. |
A dozen other large cities form distributing points, either
through a portion of their population, or because immense sup-
plies of the weed are close at hand. More and more WPA laborers
are being applied to the destruction of large fields, which, grow-
ing wild, offer a temptation to any moronic crook of the petty
type — especially if there is a Dine and Dance near by which
is violating every other law in the catalogue of decency and
needs only a supply of muggles to make the score complete.
Thus marihuana remains a real menace, and nothing which
has been said in this chapter concerning the use of it as an alibi
lessens its dangers in the slightest. Moreover, it should increase
them in the eyes of the careful person. Everything that a parent
ever has heard about the drug should be remembered, especially
when the boy or the girl of the family announces:
THE GHOST COMES BACK 149
“Mamma, I’m going to take the car tonight. We're all going
out to the Quick and Dirty. It’s an awful dump, but they've got
the swellest orchestra.”
For the Quick and Dirty, sn addition to a swell orchestr2,
can also be a force joint where a patron is welcomed only so
long as the drinks keep coming. There also may be 2 marihuans
seller skulking in the toilet, a dirty kitchen, insanitary bar con-
ditions, bootleg liquor sold in fake bottles and with counterfeit
stamps, and other “inducements” of a type recently enumerated
by Lawrence J. Casey, editor of Beverage Business, a house org2>
of the New Jersey Licensed Beverage Association, as taver:
practices which sensible owners should avoid:
“crpip TEASE ACTS— MUSCLE AND BELLY DANCERS — GUTT:
JOKES FROM EITHER A SOLO OR MIXED ACT — PURCHASE OF MICS -
FINN’S FROM BARTENDERS FOR JOKE PURPOSES —— DRAWS CURTAI
WHEN SHOWS ARE PRESENTED ~~ OBSCENE SIGNS (MASQUERADE
UNDER FUNNY SAYINGS) IN EITHER ROOMS FOR THE STALLIONS ©
FILLIES — ADVERTISEMENTS FROM DOCTOR PLL CURE IT —~ ©* NVENIE!
TELEPHONE NUMBERS — LIQUOR IN BOTTLES WHICH DO NOT MAT
UP WITH LABELS — CHEATING ON THE DRINKS — ADDING THE ROU"
TO THE CHECK — WAITERS WITH THAT FLOATING CHECK — UNWASE
GLASSES — NOSE CONTRACTING WASH ROOMS —- WASH ROOMS WT)
OUT SOAP OR TOWELS — THREE DOORS DOWN, RING TWICE AND
FOR MYRTLE, AND TELL HER I SENT YOU.”
The foregoing “sdded attractions” are often a part of ©
picture when the chiseling liquor dealer is concerned; likew
they are the things against which Prohibitionists can focus atte
tion once a local-option or statewide movement to outlaw lic.
is begun. It is human nature to strike at something mater
rather than causes which may lie behind a condition. Last y*
for instance, there was a slaying in what was known as a~
shack,” a thing of tarpaper and old boardings, near Jacks
Tennessee. A pretty young girl, of easy amours, had gone tc
with a young man, only to be surprised by the married ©
who believed he owned her because he was paying her expe’
aia. WR des 2 era or adi aoe
tpn Maa ile ORE pth HE 3 tt 5 ‘
‘ rpetnne petongacans + wg) *
iA
ik aig ia aegis ne
172 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
The place was in disorder. There were evidences of a heavy
party. On the pillowslip of Shannon’s bed was the outline of a
woman’s lips, in rouge. Shannon’s car was gone, to be found
later, wrecked in a roadside ditch, the surrounding earth show-
ing impressions of feminine footprints.
Inquiries were begun, leading to the identification of the two
tourist-camp hitchhikers. They were traced through several
states, the trail finally ending near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and
quite by accident. A man had been arrested for speeding. In
the car with him were two girls. The trio was held overnight
in jail, only to be released the next morning. The girls were
Jean Brooks and Beulah Honeycutt, and were identified by
Indiana officers from descriptions after they had been freed. It
was necessary now for the State Police, who usually do the
worth-while jobs when crime reaches the rural districts, to
throw out a blockade. The girls, still in the company of their
pick-up friend, were caught at the Tennessee line and returned
to Indiana for trial, where Jean was given thirty years and
Beulah Honeycutt sentenced to ninety-nine.
“Beulah had gone to bed with Shannon,” said Jean. “I had
flopped down on a couch in the parlor. After a while I woke
up at the sound of a shot and went in the other room. Beulah
had shot that nice old man for one hundred dollars that he car-
ried with him. Then she handed me the gun and told me to
shoot him too, so I would be in the mess as deep as she was.
So I did.”
Crime — the hitchhiker — the crooked tourist camp; they are
linked inseparably. If one studies the story, for instance, of Lester
Brockelhurst and his girl friend Bernice, there will be addi-
tional pressure on the gas when the forlorn figures of a man
and a girl— always with the suitcase appear by the side
of the road. Here indeed is an evidence of what the hitchhik-
ing, tourist-camp combination can do.
Brockelhurst had been a Sunday School teacher in Illinois.
That was before he began to forge checks and was sent away
oo :
A CABIN FOR THE NIGHT 173
to Pontiac Reformatory. It was during this pre-crime phase
that he met Bernice, who was fourteen, and evidently had sexual
relations with her, although this is not stated in his confessions.
Brockelhurst was about twenty-two when he got out of the
reformatory; Bernice was seventeen. He had a very convincing
story regarding the rehabilitation which had been effected; all
he needed now was a chance, he said. Bernice’s father took him
in, and Brockelhurst took his chance. In fact, he took one chance
too many and Bernice became pregnant. They decided to leave
Rockford, Illinois, the girl’s home, where Brockelhurst hac
been living. To do this, they needed money. 3
Where Brockelhurst got a revolver is not explained. How-
ever, this reformed young man possessed one, and, with it, he
held up a Rockford tailor, forced the man to drive some seven
miles out of town, then shot and killed him. He propped the
body up in the car, drove until he found a ditch, dumped the
murdered man there, and in the bloodstained automobile re-
turned to Rockford where Bernice, her bag all packed. awaited
him. How she failed to see the fresh blood of a newly murdered
man is not quite clear, but she says she didn’t know a thing
about it.
Now they had money and an automobile, so they started to
Salt Lake City, ostensibly to visit some of Brockelhurst’s rela-
tives. The most amazing thing about criminals is the cold-
blooded manner in which they deliberately set forth to visit the
home folks immediately after some horrible crime. Gang molls
will rush by air to their mothers, murderers hurry home to
their wives and babies. Catch-as-catch-can slayers contrive tc
make their escape along routes which will allow them to stop
off here and there with relatives whom they had not thought
about for years. This habit is widespread; the story of Dillinger
was full of it, as were the stories of all other major gangsters anc
their molls. Brockelhurst was no exception.
They reached Ogden, Utah, and there, according to a con-
fession, their money ran out. They were staying at a fours!
me
ee ce ne
ooo Pape
118 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
criminals, and at the time of Young’s visit to Louisville, a citizen
remarked that the police received less pay than the garbage men.
That these are a cross-section of many law-enforcement con-
ditions is common knowledge. It is disconcerting, nevertheless,
to realize that not only does the crook know of such conditions
but that knowledge is a part of the general store of information
possessed by American nomads of all classes.
Reference already has been made to the vast knowledge which
wandering youth possesses concerning places to go, spots where
money is flowing quickly, cities which are wide open, and com-
munities where “the cops just push you on.” In this connection,
it is more than coincidental that the states which offer the greatest
lure to these nomads are the ones in which the handling of liquor
and tavern licenses has been twisted by politics or graft or mere
inefficiency into pretty much of a mess.
It was not so many years ago that believers in personal freedom
looked forward to Repeal as a new day in the common-sense
handling of the liquor problem. It seemed so patent that with
such graphic memories of the graft, the corruption, the horrible
murder-coll of Prohibition there would be no such mistakes under
Repeal. Every state would do its utmost to manage the future
so that never again could a Prohibitionist lift his head. There
would be rigid restriction of liquor handling. The personnel
would be of the finest. Laws would be strong and well enforced.
There are some such communities. The road wanderers know
all ot them, and shy from them as dead, dull spots where a girl
can’t make a fast five or a slow twenty. The youth has no
chance there to get a temporary job as a case-keeper in a gambling
joint, or a runner for a numbers or bolita or race-bookie joint.
Thus, by gossip, or by trial and error, they know the liquor laws
of the country and guide their routes accordingly. There are
plenty of warm spots to which they can turn.
Instead of having a uniformity of purpose toward wiping out
all errors of the past, many of the liquor laws of America are
, today such that they actually invite violation of statutes and the
Nw
ae
DEATH AT THE TAVERN 119
commission of crimes or the harboring of criminals. No more
vital condition exists than that which demands an entire over-
hauling, a strengthening of statutes, an elimination of politics,
and a general attempt to put the country on some sort of uni-
form basis by which the crook, the chiseler, the politician and
grifter can be driven out. It was not the intention of the Amer-
ican people to put crooks into the liquor business. Yet it has
happened many times.
For instance, “a reputable character is required” in some seven
states, among which is Georgia. Therefore, the story of a
Georgian, Harvey Nelson, will give a proper perspective into
the raping of Repeal, as practised in too many places. oe
Harvey Nelson had started his rise to fame by accepting hve
hundred dollars from a young plantation man in Southerh
Georgia, for which Nelson assumed the responsibility for a chek
of doubtful parentage. He also married the girl and for a number
of years wandered the country with her, earning a living as a
railroad worker. With Repeal, he decided to open a roacnouse
and furnish panting Georgians with drinks and dancing. ie
Nelson was illiterate, ignorant, overbearing. There were fignts
and brawls at his dump. A young girl came to work for him, a
blonde named Verna Mae. She was listed as a waitress and she did
serve drinks and food. She also served Harvey, and so weil
that when Nelson’s wife died suddenly, neighborhood gossip
revived the many stories current concerning the terrible beating
which the roadhouse keeper had given his wife, following quar-
rels over the intrusion of Verna Mae.
The body was examined, and found to be badly bernie
Harvey Nelson was tried on a charge of voluntary manslaughter
on the technicality that he had aided her death by neglectin
Convicted and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, ne ap-
S
1
- mer,
g rier.
pealed.
Now, until that appeal was reviewed, this man was a con-
victed criminal. Nevertheless, Harvey Nelson went to Waycross,
ae Mae
Georgia, and opened a roadhouse, taking his girl, Verna Viae,
a satel
anepnignatn ee
120 DESIGNS IN SCARLET
with him, and making the addition of another waitress, Mary,
who had floated to him from Indiana. Both girls were now eight-
een.
The roadhouse failed. About that time, however, the Supreme
Court reversed the verdict of manslaughter and ordered a new
trial. Apparently on the strength of this chance to rehabilitate
his character — since he still stood accused of the crime —
Harvey Nelson obtained backing upon which he opened a new
and bigger roadhouse on United States Route One, just outside
Waycross. There he took his two waitresses, and his ten-year-old
son. One day a rush call came for officers. Litele “*}C.,” as the
boy was known, evidently had shot himself with a pistol he had
found on his father’s dresser.
When the officers arrived, they noticed several things which
caused suspicions. One was that one of the girls, Mary, had con-
cealed the pistol in the bosom of her dress, producing it only
when the sheriff announced that there could not be a suicide
without a visible weapon. Another was that Harvey Nelson was
weeping large amounts of crocodile tears and that Verna Mae
was, to use a police expression, highly unco-operative. Besides this,
the negro cook, wall-eyed with fright, blatted the fact that there
was something wrong about the whole affair, since, according to
her story, Harvey and the girls had commanded her not to
answer questions. The trio was taken away for interrogation.
What followed was an amazing conglomeration which has not
yet been truly unraveled.
Harvey Nelson made seventeen confessions. In some he ab-
solved the girls. In others he accused Verna Mae of doing the
shooting. In a third set, he insisted that the two waitresses had
drawn straws to determine who should kill little “J. C.,”” since
he himself could not because of the fact that he already was
facing a murder charge. The motive in this killing, incidentally,
was a miserable insurance policy of less than a thousand dollars
carried on the boy’s life. According to one of Nelson’s confessions,
Verna Mae was to get an automobile, which already was in her
DEATH AT THE TAVERN 121
name, Mary was to receive a third of the insurance pee es
Nelson would get the rest, after funeral expenses were ‘part. : ,
man also rather proudly confessed in one statement that <. ‘a |
been living with both of the young waitresses, and that he had
promised to marry the one who did the killing. er
The girls denied the charges, except to admit that they oe
present. Last July, Nelson was convicted and sentenced to the
electric chair, while Verna Mae was sentenced to life imprison-
ment, both sentences being appealed. Mary testified as .
witness. If an appeal should be successful in Harvey Ne <
case, thus releasing him from the death cell, would the me
that be in Georgia again decide he was 2 man ot fine, oa -
ing character and just the fellow to run another roadhouse?_I
cs tee
i : oe
lf this case were anusual, it would not be worth writing. U
Nelson was a mere amateur in
fortunately, however, Harvey Nelson
criminality by comparison with ne othe eee
reputation” to whom laxity, greed or politics gives the right f°
i 1 3} rerns which are mare
dispense liquor, especially in the roadside taverns which oe
and more becoming pesthouses of our highways and suburban
& ne
some of the other men ot good
districts.
In nineteen states the granting © " an
7 a . . x £ *
to the discretion of the Liquor Commission. Some thirteen otne
i e be rson con-
states demand that no keeper of a liquor house be a person 0
a felony — 2 condition usually overcome by knowing
£ liquor licenses ts left wholly
victed of
the right politicians. , e
Comparatively few license boards require fingerprinting of
f the fact that it requires
i h o
licants. One state mikes muc uire
ie Then, there 1s Lilinois
an oath to accompany its application. ny , ae
which requires: “Good character. No conviction © any sta
of federal liquor laws or felony under Ulincis laws. No con-
sandering or for keeping 2 house of i-fat
nsed liquor is sold in many places which also
d prostitution, known pimps sell it, exspaae?
us retail and wholesale angles of the marketing
ands among other things that no person shall
viction for pan
Nevertheless, lice
have gambling an
leggers are in vario
of it. Louisiana dem
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