Brutes, Beasts and Human Fiends PDF
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Brutes, Beast and Human Fiends Ten True Stories of America’s Most Depraved Murderers of All Time By Alan Hynd Eternal Press A division of Damnation Books, LLC. P.O. Box 3931 Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998 www.eternalpress.biz Brutes, Beast and Human Fiends Ten True Stories of America’s Most Depraved Murderers of All Time by Alan Hynd Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-254-9 Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-255-6 Cover art by: Dawné Dominique Re-EDITED BY NOEL HYND Copyedited by: Shannyn Lenihan Copyright Diane and Noel Hynd, 2010 Printed in the United States of America Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights 1st North American and UK Print Rights All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews. This book is a work of non-fiction, true crime. Occasionally, however, names, places and incidents were modified by the original author to respect the privacy of certain victims and their families. If your heart and stomach are strong enough, then you will surely enjoy this blood-chilling parade of murders and other grisly deeds too ghastly to mention here. This collection of true stories of unholy horror and unspeakable evil were written by one of America’s most brilliant fact-crime reporters—Alan Hynd. Brutes, Beasts And Human Fiends TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Lethal Louise, The Black Widow Of California 2. “Pretty” Louie Amberg, Brooklyn’s Maestro of Murder 3. Killer Kate Bender And The Kansas Death Trap 4. “If Them Gators Could Only Talk!” 5. The Sausage Maker And The Cooked Cadaver 6. Little Lethal Lyda And The Constant Coffins 7. Chicago’s Perpetual Widow And The Fulfilled Prophecies 8. The Man Who Married Too Often 9. The Amorous Fiend Of West Virginia 10. Arsenic, Old Lace And Sister Amy Archer Foreword In many ways, I went into the family business. Writing. My father, Alan Hynd, never graduated from high school but somehow found his way onto the staff as a reporter for The Boston Post around 1921. Born in 1903, the only son of Scottish immi- grants, that was still pretty young to take up a reporter’s craft. But nonetheless, he did. The rise and fall of Charles Ponzi, inventor of the swindling scheme that bore his name, was one of my fa- ther’s first stories in Boston. As a result, my father was frequently assigned to police desks and began a career writing true crime stories. The career path later led him to other newspapers in New York and Philadelphia as well as Trenton, N.J., which was his home- town. He worked on those papers through the 1920’s and 1930’s, which were particularly fascinating times in American history. Almost all of his newspapers are long gone now and, sadly, so is he. He died suddenly in January 1974. But during his lifetime, my father saw, close up, the seamy underside of American life in the early and middle Twentieth Century. And he wrote about it, first for the newspapers, then later for the American true crime magazines that flourished in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, then finally for the “big” magazines of the time, like True, The Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. The subject matter was not without its drawbacks. Covering the Lindberg kidnapping in the 1930’s, my father had his first generation American idealism forever tarnished by what he said was the legal railroading of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, whom he was convinced was only a bit player—if that—in a much big- ger kidnapping conspiracy. He wrote about what he saw at the trial, the inconsistency and questionable nature of the evidence the incompetence of the defense attorney (who was hired by the Hearst newspapers and was frequently asleep in the courtroom) and the ulterior motivations of everyone to just get the case “fin- ished” as quickly as possible —e.g, bootleggers in New Jersey who were tired of having their beer trucks stopped by the state police looking for the missing child. As a reward for his straightforward reporting, my father was removed from covering the case by his paper. He wasn’t giving readers what they wanted to read, his edi- tors had told him. Many years later, he wrote a celebrated maga- zine article called “Why The Lindberg Case Will Never Be Solved.” The case never was and never will be, mainly for the reasons cited in the article. At other times during that era, he reported authoritatively on the famous outlaws of the era, notably Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly. During World War Two, times treated him well. He had two best-sellers in 1943, Passport to Treason and Betrayal from the East. This time the subject was espionage, by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I would recom- mend neither for historical accuracy. But it was wartime and it was what the public wanted. From time to time, he would receive unsolicited letters of praise from J. Edgar Hoover. He was always contemptuous of Hoover and privately referred to him as “a fraud who liked to come in and have his picture taken after the agents had done all the work.” On many occasions, he couldn’t resist giving some people things they didn’t want to read. After presenting all the facts about a prominent murder case in the Bahamas in the late 1940’s, he was poisoned by representatives of a powerful and uncharged suggested perpetrator. The would-be killers may or may not have broken into our family home in Fairfield, Connecticut to plant to poison in 1952. The assignment was nearly successful. I can re- member the trips to the hospital, shrouded in silence and mys- tery, when I was about 5 years old. At another time, some mobsters just plain decided they didn’t like him, so they kidnapped him and held him—at gunpoint and for ransom—in a second floor room at the Hotel Dixie on Times Square. His magazine, Official Detective, I think it was, delivered $300 cash. Unmarked bills in an envelope, just like in the movies. Only $300, you ask? Well, everything was cheap in those days and the hotel was conveniently located in the West 40’s around the corner from the editorial offices. One of the gunmen sat in the window watching the street, twirling the chamber of a thirty- eight. The bad guys saw all the movies too and wanted to present themselves just the way George Raft did. At other times, our home served as guests to certain question- able folks who wanted to sell their stories. I remember in particu- lar a Lebanese-American gangster from Bridgeport, Connecticut who politely educated me how to fix harness races and boxing matches while my father had a sit-down with his boss. As I said, interesting times. What conclusion did I draw from these events as I grew up? It was, I decided, much safer to write fiction than cover true crime. But I digress. Over the course of fifty years, Alan Hynd must have covered more than a thousand police cases: domestic mur- derers, swindlers, bank robbers, serial killers, extortionists, em- bezzlers, con men. You name it, he saw it and put it on paper. From time to time I personally met some of the people he wrote about. They were, to say the least, memorable. One goon gave me instructions on how to sneak up behind someone with a blackjack and bop someone over the head with maximum effectiveness. Another showed me how to deal cards from the bottom of the deck and what to listen for if someone was doing that. I remember another who kept calling our home phone number—never mind that it was unlisted, this guy got it anyway—telling my father that he was just out of prison and had a great story to tell. Well, he was just out of prison. He was an escapee, in fact, and the calls stopped when the cops caught him and sent him back. In terms of press coverage, however, the Bahamian sorehead aside, often the stipulations of these gentlemen were twofold: “Just tell honestly what I done. And spell my name right.” Brutes, Beasts and Human Fiends is a small sampler of such accounts. These stories were originally published in various mag- azines of the time, in various forms and several times, then in a small anthology by this same title which sold well in 1964 and then again in 1970. Thanks to the magic of electronic publish- ing, it’s now back. I’ve updated some of the references, fixed some story points that needed clarification over the years, but tried to remain in the same voice and the same atmosphere. These stories are true and the names are spelled right. My fa- ther wrote with a smile, a wink in his eye and a sense of the ma- cabre aspects of depraved human motivation. The victims you are about to read about got gassed, shot, poisoned, stabbed, strangled, boiled, broiled, ground up, blackjacked, bitten by snakes, bombed, sent for swims in concrete blocks, fed to alligators, smothered and bludgeoned. One of our killers, when he ran out of victims and the cops were closing in, did a final civic improvement and even killed himself. In keeping with the style of the time, sometimes dialogue was “recreated.” The reader is asked to kindly go with the flow. There used to be an old newsroom adage that suggested that a writer never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The facts here are so bizarre that they never needed to get in the way. But despite the grim subject matter, one might sense the author smiling and winking between the lines. I know I can. Enjoy. Noel Hynd Culver City, CA December 2010 Brutes, Beast and Human Fiends Lethal Louise, The Black Widow Of California You would hardly have suspected that the pretty, well-stacked little lady, who belied her fifty-one years, who tripped gaily out of the women’s prison in Tehachapi, California that fine spring day in 1939, had just been paroled after doing eighteen years in the big bad cage for murder. Louise Peete, who, with a moss-and-honey- suckle drawl, knew how to swear falsely on a stack of Bibles, had convinced the parole authorities that she was ready to go and sin no more. And the suckers had believed her—believed an unholy bitch on wheels who had, before knocking off a millionaire lover and stuffing his stiff in a booze closet, gotten away with three oth- er scraggings and driven three jakes to suicide. So here she was—the top arch-murderess of her era—all set to go out, betray the chumps who had paroled her, continue on her lethal ways, and perpetrate her masterpiece. Lethal Louise, who had, over the years, gone under a variety of monikers, now changed her name again, as easily as she changed her dress. She began calling herself Anna Lou Lee. Or Mrs. Peete. And she started looking for jobs as a housekeeper in fashionable Pacific Palisades. Who was this woman—this arch-fiend in skirts? She was born Lofie Louise Preslar in Bienville, Louisiana in 1880— a member of the female species dedicated to the proposition that the male of the species are suckers. She belonged to that school of thought which holds that the average man is also more or less insane, de- pending on his degree of proximity to the exercise of the repro- ductive prowess. Man, Louise held (and proved it for forty-four years) attains complete sanity only immediately after reaching a sexual climax; then, in a little while, say twenty minutes, the old nuttiness begins to creep back again, increasing in intensity un- til another climax is, in an hour or a day or a week or a month, attained. “Keep a man happy after dark,” Louise always said, “and the daylight hours will take care of themselves.” Page 1
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