Doris Lane

As a ten-year-old girl, Theodosia Burr could read Latin and Greek. Her doting father, Aaron Burr, thought she could walk on water. And that’s just what she’s been doing off the Outer Banks of North Carolina since early January 1813.

Born in the final year of the American Revolution, it is more or less accepted that she died in a coastal storm during the War of 1812 onboard a privateer, the Patriot. She certainly vanished. There was indeed a gale force storm off Cape Hatteras. A British ship did attempt to detain the Patriot. Three retired pirates separately in the course of the 19th century claimed to have plundered the schooner.

But what really became of Theodosia Burr Alston after her husband saw her off in Charleston on a trip to visit her father in New York?

To this day, as Theo’s ghost dressed in white is seen walking the tips of the waves off the beach of Huntington Beach State Park at Nags Head in North Carolina, nobody knows what became of her. But there are legends enough to explain her death or her later life, depending on whom you believe. The stories come from land and sea and one time they actually converge.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ruth Brown was only 13 when she went to work as a telephone operator. She worked the night shift. During the day she studied shorthand and bookkeeping and dreamed of growing up and marrying her boss. Not the boss at the telephone company, but some ideal of a wealthy executive with whom she would live happily ever after. Not that Ruth would lack for marriage proposals. Later in life, while on trial for murdering her husband, she would receive a total of 164.

Ruth was 20 in 1915 when she married her employer, the editor of Motor Boating magazine, Albert Snyder. Before marrying Ruth, Snyder had been engaged 10 years to Jessie Guishard and he hadn’t exactly gotten over her. When Albert and Ruth set up housekeeping, one of the first pictures to hang on a wall of the family home was Jessie’s. When Albert bought a boat he named it after Jessie. When Ruth objected, Albert declared that Jessie was “the finest woman I have ever met.”

Needless to say, this was not the marriage Ruth had dreamed it would be, but she and Albert managed to have a daughter, Lorraine, in 1918.

In the early 1920s Ruth bobbed her hair and took up dancing, playing bridge, and otherwise cavorting her way through the Jazz Age. Albert took no interest in these pursuits, or in his wife, staying home with Lorraine in Queens Village, N.Y., while Ruth had her fun. Ruth called him, “the old crab,” and went out dancing the nights away.

Ruth was a good-looking woman. Damon Runyon described her as “A chilly-looking blonde with frosty eyes and one of those marble you-bet-you-will chins.” It was just a matter of time before this disgruntled housewife found another man to occupy her time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Harp’s Hill is near the Pond River in western Muhlenberg County, Ky., not far from Highway 62. There is a crossing in the road near Dixon named Harp’s Head and one of the crossing roads is named Harp’s Head Road. Some miles away, the precise location lost to time, there is a cave known as Harp’s House. To tell how these places earned their names is to tell the story of Micajah (Big) and Wiley (Little) Harp, America’s first known serial killers.

They passed for brothers, but were cousins, sons of brothers John and William Harpe, Scottish immigrants to Orange County, N.C. The boys were named William (Micajah/Big), son of John, and Joshua (Wiley/Little), son of William. Big Harp and Little Harp left home as young men in 1775, aiming to become overseers of slaves in Virginia. Career plans diverted by the American Revolution, the Harps instead became Tory outlaws in a gang that roved the North Carolina countryside, raping farmers’ daughters, pillaging livestock and crops, and burning farmhouses. In the attempted kidnapping of one young girl by a Tory rape gang, Little Harp was shot and wounded by local Patriot Captain James Wood.

In 1780, the British took the Tory irregulars and their Cherokee allies into their ranks. The Harps fought under Tarleton’s command at King’s Mountain, near the Carolinas’ border, in October; in the Battle of Blackstocks in November, and in January 1781 in the Battle of Cowpens. Shortly after Cowpens, the Harps left the army and joined up with their Cherokee confederates, taking part in the Indian raid on Station Bluff, now Nashville, Tenn. They soon returned to North Carolina, where they kidnapped Captain Wood’s daughter, Susan, and another local girl, Maria Davidson. The kidnapped women would serve as wives to the Harps until the bitter end. Read the rest of this entry »

Modern day Americans have a love of genealogy and spend a great deal of time, energy and money pursuing what is an all out passion for our family histories. In the course of it, almost always, family secrets come tumbling out of time. In Edward Ball’s case, the fact that his family owned slaves was hardly a secret. The Balls owned nearly four thousand people for over 150 years, on more than twenty plantations. Ball’s family, far from forgetting or obscuring the fact, wore its slaveholding status proudly, passed stories of plantation slavery freely, deposited their business and personal papers in South Carolina archives for all the world to see.

Not spoken of, ever, was the blood kinship white Ball descendants shared with black ones.

For a white Staten Island, New York family, the news came as a thunderbolt the day they learned, from a reporter, that DNA testing of the remains of Thomas Jefferson showed their descent from this president of the United States and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings. For Edward Ball, the first inkling of his mixed race family came when he was a nine year old on a summer’s drive with his father and brother through the South Carolina rice plantation district.
Read the rest of this entry »

By the age of eight, Richard Biegenwald had a gambling and alcohol problem. But this was not the start of it. When he was only five, in 1945, he had tried to burn down his family’s home in the rural, southwestern Staten Island, town of Charleston. It was not the end of it, either. When he was 11, he set himself afire.

Biegenwald graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade, at age 16, and had but a few weeks of high school. At 17, in 1958, he stole a car, drove north across the Island to the Bayonne Bridge and into Bayonne, New Jersey. In holding up a grocery store, he shot and killed Stephen Sladowski, the store owner and an assistant district attorney. Biegenwald and his partner in the crime took off for the South.

In Salisbury, Maryland he shot and killed a policeman. A little while later, he fired off a shotgun at Maryland state troopers who had pulled him over for speeding.

Convicted of killing Sladowski, Biegenwald received his first life sentence; he was released in 1974. In 1977 he stopped reporting to his parole officer and the system seemed simply to forget him.

In 1983, he would confide in one of his jailors that he had killed some 300 young women in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all having long, dark hair. He lured the girls into his car by promising them pot, and then, at an isolated location, would shoot or stab them to death.
Read the rest of this entry »

The man went out shopping along Third Avenue in New York. He bought a good quantity of sleeping powders, a lot of heavy brown wrapping paper, two hundred razor blades, and an extremely large supply of vanishing cream. Then he went to a luggage store and bought a large steamer trunk, the kind with compartments for a wardrobe. The trunk could be explained; the man was about to go on a European honeymoon. But two hundred razor blades and several pounds of vanishing cream? And then there was all that heavy brown wrapping paper.

Not to mention that when the man reserved passage for his honeymoon voyage on the S.S. Olympic, he bought only a single ticket.
Read the rest of this entry »

Con Edison workers in the West 64th Street building found a wooden toolbox sitting on a windowsill. Inside was an unexploded pipe bomb with a note wrapped around it: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.”

It was November 16, 1940, and the man who would be known as The Mad Bomber walked into the Consolidated Edison office, dropped his toolbox, and walked out again. The small bomb never exploded. The Bomb Squad of the NYPD found no fingerprints or other evidence. It was wartime, everybody was busy, and after a cursory investigation, the case went away. But the Mad Bomber did not go away for 16 years.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Defenestration of Ana Mendieta

The panty-clad sculptress came out a 34-story window with a sill as high as her chest. The windowsill had on it a goodly layer of soot, bearing no footprints, and not mussed in any way. She landed on the roof of the Montien Thai restaurant on Broadway in Greenwich Village, or what they now call NoHo. People would always think she landed on the Delion Deli, but no, it was the Montien Thai. The restaurant and the deli next door shared the roof, however, and rising to great height through that roof was 300 Mercer Street, a blond brick apartment tower of many, many windows.

The kitchen ceiling of the Delion Deli shook with the impact. The short order cook and his assistants ran out into Waverly Place. The doorman of 11 Waverly Place was walking along Mercer Street to the Broadway corner and the deli.

“Maybe somebody pushed somebody out of a window,” the doorman said, “because I just heard a woman screaming.”

What the doorman said he heard was: “No, no, no, no, don’t!” Then he heard an explosive sound, the likes of which he’d never heard before, not even in Viet Nam, the sound of 93 pounds of woman hitting a rooftop at a speed of 125 MPH.

“She went out the window,” is what Carl Andre said to the 911 Operator. “She went to the bathroom and I went after her and she went out the window.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Ocean Grove began as a Methodist camp meeting site following the Civil War. The camp meeting continues on a somewhat smaller scale every summer to this day. But, today, the town is a community mix of year-round residential, summer resort, and camp meeting. Both visitors and residents form an interesting, sometimes bizarre, always fascinating, conglomeration of families, single people and couples, both gay and straight, old and young, professionals and mechanics, artists and musicians, the sane and something less than sane, and, as ever, Methodists.

The entire town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its architectural sweep features everything Victorian, from simple cottages, with a few Craftsman bungalows thrown in, to suitably gee-gawed larger homes, rambling shore hotels, cozy inns and B&Bs, and, of course, tents. (Don’t think you can get a tent, though, the rights are inherited.) If you’ve been to Cape May and were saddened by the loss of many of the historic Victorian structures there, come to Ocean Grove where all but a few are still standing. You may not, in fact, change your own house exterior to suit yourself in this protected historic community, and just try planting a tree that interferes with an ocean view.

The planned town was developed out of the tent community for middle and upper middle class Victorians. The planners were very clever and their ideas have proven to endure. The beach blocks (considered first to fourth in from the ocean) were laid out way back then to capture the sea breeze in an era of no air conditioning. The houses closest to the beach were set back with lawns out front. Gradually, moving along the street and away from the water, the setbacks were inched forward, until they reached the sidewalks, so that a wedge formed of each street wall, to funnel breezes through the rest of the town.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Sunday and the church bells ring happily across the square-mile town of Ocean Grove, New Jersey. They ring just as happily every day of the week. It’s one of the joys of living in a Methodist Camp Meeting town. The ultimate joy, of course, is living in a Methodist Camp Meeting town on the sea. And I thank the Methodists of 1870 for thinking enough about it to build their town here on the Atlantic Ocean.

My readers already know that I just love to poke gentle fun at our Ocean Grove Methodists. I notice that this column, as a matter of fact, has attracted some actual Methodists to its readership. So far, they laugh with me, thank God, and do not take offense. The truth of the matter, poor sinner I may be, I have a great deal of respect for the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association (also known as, “the Methodists”) and Methodism is dear to my heart, if not near enough, as it would like to be, to my soul.

The first reason for the respect I hold for the Methodists of Ocean Grove is the diabolically clever way in which they designed this town.
Read the rest of this entry »