Doris Lane

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 »

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 »

The view from the Outerbridge Crossing, the bridge that takes travelers over the Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy, New Jersey to Staten Island, New York, gives some sense of what the town of Charleston was like at several times in its history. You can pick out Greek Revival mansions built by early 19th century oyster captains and the rotting hulks of early 20th century ships abandoned in the Kill. The burnt clay of this area helped define Manhattan’s terra cotta skyline in the early 20th century.

On a hilltop stands the Stick-Style mansion of Balthazar Kreischer, whose yellow bricks paved some of New York’s streets in the late 19th century and covered many of its row house blocks. Kreischer built a thriving company town he called Kreischerville. The town had a waterfront, and marshland on the other side. The other two borders were deep woods. Despite the factory, the town’s aspect was, and in some areas, still is, decidedly rural.

By the 1920s, Kreischerville was already calling itself Charleston and the factory that Kreischer built was on its way out of business. The little factory town was slowly relaxing back into its pre-industrial countryside. It was a slow kind of place. The kind of place where a nursing mother sitting on her porch would notice a stranger passing by, simply because he was a stranger.

But this stranger was acting, well, strange.

Read the rest of this entry »

Edna Crawford Champion’s wealthy husband, Albert, invented the spark plug. Champion was a Frenchman with a French wife in Detroit, when he met young Edna while on a business trip to New York. She was there from St. Louis looking for a rich husband and she found Albert. He paid his wife a million dollars to divorce him, married Edna, and took her to live in Detroit.

The blonde and beautiful Edna did not take to the Motor City. World War I was over, the 1920s on the horizon, and Edna married Albert’s money to have fun. Well, good, New York here we come! Albert adored Edna and indulged her in anything she wanted, almost. He would buy her jewels, furs, and dresses. He would live in New York. He just wouldn’t give her any money of her own. And he was extremely jealous of any interest she showed in men nearer her age.

It was on a trip to join Albert, who was in Paris on business, that Edna met Charles Brazelle. Albert wasn’t able to meet his wife at the railroad station and sent an old friend named Barney Oldfield, an automobile racer, to pick up Edna. Barney had with him a younger friend—handsome, suave, Sorbonne-educated, half American and half French—Charlie Brazelle, who had a definite way with women.

Charlie and Edna began a hot love affair that very day. They met secretly at first, but once Albert Champion found them out, they started going out together in public. They were together at the Crillon Bar one day when Albert barged in, demanding that Edna either come home and be a good wife, or he would cut her off without a cent. Brazelle beat Albert to a pulp there in the Crillon. Poor old Albert was found dead in his hotel room a few hours later.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fire!!!

On Christmas night, 1843, at 9:00 flames curled out from under the closed shutters of the George Housman house. Two boys returning from a skating party sounded the alarm. Fire was a serious matter in this society. Houses were built of wood, and there was little in the way of organized fire companies.

More than 20 people rushed to the burning house from neighboring houses and from the nearby tavern. Daniel Crocheron and Abraham Muller broke down the door. Abraham Housman, George’s father, and others crowded into the kitchen. Out in the cold, dark yard stood a circle of onlookers.

Murder!!!

Isaac Kruser took a stick and began poking through the smoldering pile in a corner. At a closer look, he went screaming bloody, blue murder into the night. The baby daughter’s skull was crushed. Emeline Van Pelt Housman’s throat looked to have been cut. Her left arm was broken in two places. There was a jagged wound along the forearm. Emeline’s skull also had been fractured. Her right wrist wore a black silk kerchief tied in a sailor’s knot. The bedclothes were stained in blood.
Read the rest of this entry »