Monthly Archives: June 2020

MFDJ 06/30/2020: Dostoyevsky’s Seizures

Today’s Disheveled Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Biographers disagree about whether Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky suffered seizures when young, but he himself said that his epilepsy emerged only after his near execution in Siberia. Dostoyevsky and some fellow radicals were arrested in April 1849 on charges of plotting to overthrow Czar Nicholas. That December soldiers dragged the lot of them to a snowy public square studded with three tall posts. Until that moment the comrades assumed they’d get off with breaking rocks for a spell. Then a priest arrived, as did a firing squad, and clerks handed the prisoners white smocks to change into – funeral shrouds.

Dostoyevsky grew frantic, especially when a friend pointed to a cart filled with what looked like coffins. Soldiers meanwhile marched the crew’s ringleaders to the posts and covered their eyes with white hoods. The gunmen raised their rifles. A minute of agony passed. Suddenly the rifles dropped, and a messenger clattered up on horseback, carrying a pardon. In reality Nicholas had staged the entire scene to teach the punks a lesson, but the stress unhinged Dostoyevsky. And after he’d spent a few months in a labor camp (the czar didn’t let them of THAT easy), the abusive guards and harsh weather finally pushed him over the edge, and he had his first major fit – shrieking, foaming, convulsions, the whole production.

That first seizure lowered the threshold inside Dostoyevsky’s brain, and after that, any mild stressor, mental or physical, could fell him. Guzzling champagne could trigger fits, as could staying up all night to write or losing money at roulette. Even conversations could detonate him. During a philosophical bull session with a friend in 1863, Dostoyevsky began pacing back and forth, waving his arms and raving about some point. Suddenly he staggered. His face contorted and his pupils dilated, and when he opened his mouth a groan escaped: his chest muscles had contracted and forced the air out. The seizure that followed was intense. A similar incident occurred a few years later, when he collapsed onto the divan in his wife’s family’s living room and began howling. (This couldn’t have impressed the in-laws.) Dreams could set him off as well, after which he usually wet the bed. Dostoyevsky compared the seizures to demonic possession, and he often plumbed the agony of them in his writing, including epileptic characters in The Brothers Karamazov, The Insulted and Injured, and The Idiot.


Dostoyevsky in his later years.

Dostoyevsky almost certainly had temporal lobe epilepsy. (The temporal lobes sit behind your temples and wrap laterally around the brain, somewhat like earmuffs.) Not all temporal lobe epileptics thrash and foam, but many of them do experience a distinctive aura. Auras are sights, sounds, smells, or tingles that appear during the onset of seizures – a portent of worse things to come. Most epileptics experience auras of some sort, and most non-temporal lobe epileptics find them unpleasant: some unlucky folk smell burning feces, feel ants crawling beneath their skin, or pass horrendous gas. But for some reason – perhaps because the nearby limbic structures get revved up – auras that originate in the temporal lobes feel emotionally richer and often supernaturally charged. Some victims even feel their “souls” uniting with the godhead. (No wonder ancient doctors called epilepsy the sacred disease. For his part, Dostoyevsky’s seizures were preceded by a rare “ecstatic aura” in which he felt a bliss so intense it ached. As he told a friend, “Such joy would be inconceivable in ordinary life… complete harmony in myself and in the whole world.” Afterward he felt shattered: bruised, depressed, haunted by thoughts of evil and guilt (familiar motifs in his fiction). But Dostoyevsky insisted the hardship was worth it: “For a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life.”

Culled from: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

 

Ghastly!

Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945.  Here’s one of his haunting images from the book Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.

MFDJ 06/27/2020: Tenement Cruelty

Today’s Matted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the late nineteenth century, the very word “tenement” connoted to New Yorkers not just extreme poverty and disease but the worst and most senseless violence. Jacon Riis’s account of “The Man with the Knife” describes “a poor and hungry, and ragged man” who from hopelessness and desperation sprang into a busy street one day and slashed about him, “blindly seeking to kill.”

Contemporary accounts of life in the tenements are marked by brutality: from domestic violence fueled by alcohol to the criminal violence of street gangs. The most famous case of domestic violence in New York was the case of little Mary Ellen, whose story led to the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) – nearly a decade after the establishment of the American Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

The Mary Ellen case was the first case of child abuse to reach a New York City courtroom, and during the month of April 1874, New York newspapers featured lurid details of Mary Ellen’s abuse at the hands of her “mama,” Mary Connolly. Having been orphaned as an infant, Mary Ellen was “indentured” to the Connollys by the Commission of Charities and Correction, a crude form of early foster care. But Mary Connolly always suspected that the child was one of her husband’s illegitimate children, and she beat Mary Ellen daily with a two-and-a-half-foot leather “cow-hide” normally used in the city for driving horses.


Poor Mary Ellen…

By 1896 the offices of the SPCC housed hundreds of records of child abuse in the tenements. In 1896 reformer Helen Campbell wrote in her exposé Darkness and Daylight of the “screams resound[ing] through a tenement-house” as children were beaten. She documented just a few of the cases for her readers. Seven-year-old Antonia was found with her hair “matted with blood, and her face, arms, and body were covered with wounds around which the blood had dried and remained.” Ten-year-old Patrick Lacey nearly lost an eye to beatings from his drunken father, and six-year-old Jennie Lewis was found by a police officer on her knees scrubbing her tenement apartment’s floor: “Her face and body were much discolored and covered with bruises, and her emaciated arms were patched with red spots from pinches.”

Criminality extended beyond the family and into all dimensions of life. The journalist Colonel Thomas Knox documented in detail street life among the poor of New York: from petty thievery among even the youngest children to gangs of con men, bank robbers, and murderers.

circa 1890: Children play with barrels in an alley between tenement buildings in Gotham Court, 38 Cherry Street, New York City. (Photo by Jacob A. Riis/Museum of the City of New York/Getty Images)

Tenement Life

Like many observers of late-nineteenth-century New York, Knox blamed a combination of poverty, ignorant and brutish immigrants, and the evils of liquor. He also placed great blame on the nature of tenements themselves. “Whoever follows a case of distress to its abiding-place,” Knox wrote, “finds it in part of one room of a tenement-house, and that one room duplicate in wretchedness by range after range of rooms from the oozy cellar to the leaky garret, and that house duplicated by stressful of other houses, till benevolence stands aghast at misery miles in area and six stories deep.” Knox referred to the individual born into poverty in New York’s crowded and unhealthy housing as “the low tenement victim.”

Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town

MFDJ 06/21/2020: Ernie’s Wrath

Today’s Disheveled Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

This was one family affair no one would ever forget.

On the evening of Nov. 17, 1950, Ernest Ingenito, 25, decided he wanted to visit his young sons. The visit would end with five dead and four wounded.

Ernie (Loser) Ingenito

He and his wife, Theresa “Tessie,” 23, had split. She was living with her parents — Michael and Pearl Mazzoli— on their farm in Franklin Township, Gloucester County, N.J.


Michael, Pearl, and Tessie Mazzoli

At around 8:45 p.m., Ernie — disheveled and with a pistol in each pocket — pushed open the front door of his in-laws’ home, where Tessie was watching TV.

“Do you still love me?” he asked. Tessie said nothing. He demanded to see his sons. She replied, “You can’t.” He had to have a court order to visit his children.

“If you don’t want me to see the kids, here’s what you’re going to get,” he yelled and started shooting. He missed Tessie but hitting her father in the head and abdomen. Michael, 51, was dead when he hit the ground.

Ernie got off a couple more shots, catching Tessie twice, but she would survive.


Tessie, recovering from her (physical) wounds. I would imagine the emotional ones never quite healed.

The deadly daddy abandoned his quest to see his boys and turned his attention to his next target, mother-in-law Pearl, 41. But she was gone, she took off when the shooting started. Of all his wife’s relatives, he hated Pearl the most. The feeling was mutual.

She tried to hide it, but Pearl believed her only child made a poor choice for a husband, wrote Patricia A. Martinelli in her 2010 book on the case, “Rain of Bullets.” Pearl thought he was lazy, dishonest, and did not treat her daughter well. Rumors that he was physically abusive and running around with other women infuriated her. There were constant quarrels.

But it wasn’t just in-laws who brought out his demons. For Ernie, that came naturally.


Tough guy Ernie.

Born in Wildwood, N.J., in 1924, Ernie was 10 at the time of his first arrest, the start of years of petty crimes and stints in reform school. At 17, he eloped with his 16-year-old girlfriend. After two stormy years, a draft notice freed him from the marital discord.

Army life, however, did not agree with him. He went AWOL, slugged a couple of military police officers, and was court-martialed. After his dishonorable discharge, he drifted around until he hooked up with Theresa in 1946.

When the bullets began flying, Pearl ran to her parents’ house across the street, screaming, “Ernie’s over there with guns!”

At home were Pearl’s mother and father — Theresa and Armando Pioppi — her two brothers, 46 year-old John, Jino, 31, and Jino’s pregnant wife, Marion. Jino and Marion’s three children, Jeannie, 9, Armando, 7, and Teresa, 13 months were also there.


Theresa and Marion Pioppi

Ernie battered down the door and started shooting. Theresa Pioppi, 67, died first, followed by Pearl — who was shot multiple times — and then Marion, 28. John was fatally gunned down outside, while trying to catch Ernie. The gunman even sent a couple of bullets into little Jeannie, but they did not kill her.


A priest administers last rites to Marion Pioppi

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Anonymous/AP/Shutterstock (6650978a)
Mrs. Theresa Pioppi, 72, lies dead in doorway of house in Vineland, N.J. on . This is one of the shooting scenes of Ernest Ingenito, 26-years-old war veteran, who killed five members of his estranged wife’s family and wounded his wife and three others. Mrs. Pioppi is the grandmother of Ingenito’s wife, Theresa
Theresa Pioppi murder victim 1950, Vineland, USA

The body of Theresa Pioppi

The attack took about 15 minutes, but Ernie’s rampage was not over. He drove four miles to the home of his wife’s brother, Frank Mazzoli, 45, his wife, Hilda, 44, and their two children. He shot Frank and Hilda and fled. They would also survive.

It didn’t take long for state troopers to spot the killer’s car speeding away. They forced him off the road after a two-mile chase.

“I’m the man you want,” he said, holding his hands in the air. Troopers found four guns and 166 live bullet cartridges in his clothing.

“I done it, and that’s all there is to it,” he told police.


Funeral of Theresa, John, and Marion Pioppi, along with Pearl and Michael Mazzoli.

He was tried in January 1951 for the murder of his mother-in-law. If convicted, the sentence was death in the electric chair.

His lawyer tried to evoke sympathy, referring to a sad childhood, a head injury from a fall out of a tree, and weeping during his closing statement. He also tried to place some of the blame on the victim’s abrasive personality.

n the stand, Ernie told the jury that he just wanted to see his kids on the night of the murders. He brought the guns along to scare his relatives. But something snapped when he heard Pearl say, “Throw him out.”

“After that, I don’t remember anything,” he said. “I don’t remember shooting anybody.”


Ernie and a police officer after his arrest

The jury found Ernie guilty of first-degree murder but, in a decision that sparked outrage, they recommended mercy. Instead of the electric chair, he got life in prison. Four more life sentences, to be served concurrently, were added after a 1956 trial.

At the time, New Jersey did not have a provision for a life sentence with no chance of parole. Impossible as it may seem, the mass murderer was set free in 1974.

Still, that was not the end of the story.

“Ex-convict found guilty of molesting girl,” was the headline of a small item in The Record, of Hackensack, N.J., on July 14, 1994.

At 70, Ingenito was again in court, facing charges of sexually assaulting his girlfriend’s daughter, starting when she was 8. The abuse went on for years. To keep the child quiet, Ingenito read her a section about his family massacre in the crime encyclopedia Bloodletters and Badmen. He threatened to kill her and her mother if she squealed.

Off he went to jail again, sentenced to 223 years. He served about a year before death set him free in October 1995.

Culled from: NY Daily News
Generously submitted by: Katie

MFDJ 06/20/2020: A Democratic Disease

Today’s Democratic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Smallpox was a democratic scourge, afflicting  people of every race, class, and social position: Cosmetics were invented to mask the ruined complexions of the rich. The disease killed royalty as well as commoners, disrupting dynasties and alliances and repeatedly changing the course of world history. Rulers of Japan, Siam, Ceylon, Ethiopia, and Burma died of smallpox, and several European crowned heads met the same fate, including Queen Mary II of England in 1694, King Louis I of Spain in 1724, Tsar Peter II of Russia in 1730, Queen Ulrika Eleanora of Sweden in 1741, and King Louis XV of France in 1774. In Austria between 1654 and 1767, the deaths from smallpox of eleven members of the reigning Hapsburg dynasty caused four shifts in the line of succession in as many generations.

Ironically, the ubiquity of smallpox in seventeenth-century England had the beneficial effect of fostering the establishment of higher education in the American colonies. The more prosperous colonists had routinely sent their male offspring to be educated at Oxford or Cambridge, but there they ran the risk of contracting smallpox, which, by virtue of their more isolated upbringing, they had previously escaped. Seeking to avoid this risk, the colonists decided to educate their sons at home by founding new institutions of higher learning, including Harvard College in 1636, the College of William and Mary in 1693, and Yale College in 1701.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, smallpox had replaced bubonic plague, which was more episodic, as Europe’s most devastating and feared disease. London experienced five major smallpox epidemics between 1719 and 1746;; outbreaks also occurred in Rome, Berlin, Geneva, and other European cities. Smallpox was carried by ship from India to South Africa in 1713, and it reached Australia shortly after the founding of the European settlement there in 1789. By the end of the eighteenth century, smallpox was killing some 400,000 Europeans a year, mostly children and young adults, and was responsible for a third of all cases of blindness.

The disease cast a long shadow over daily life. As British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in 1800 in his History of England, “the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose life it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a  changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of a betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.” Particularly terrifying was the power of smallpox to destroy overnight the health and beauty of youth. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s historical novel, The History of Henry Esmond (1852), the eighteenth-century narrator describes the ravages of the disease in the English countryside: “I remember in my time hundreds of the young and beautiful who have been carried to the grave, or have only risen from their pillows frightfully scarred and disfigured by this malady.”

Culled from: Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox

 

Tragedy Du Jour!

DESPAIR AND HOPELESSNESS LEADS TO FAMILY TRAGEDY (1941)

A 34-year-old mother lies dead in bed after slashing three of her four children to death and cutting her own throat. Their poverty-stricken home, a shambles, is covered in blood. Her unsigned note suggests she took her family’s lives because she believed they might have had a deadly disease (syphilis). Her blood-covered message reads: “This is the best way out. Don’t touch anything. We are all suffering from a disease.” Separated from her husband for a year and a half, she was obsessed with the fear that there was something wrong with her. She was awaiting a report of a blood test from the Department of Health; she had called the day before for the results and was told she would get them in the mail. The family had been on “relief” for three years, receiving $32.75 twice a month, $19.80 in food stamps, and two daily quarts of milk for her four children. Although separated, her husband still lived with the family. He had been out of work for three years, having lost his job with the police department due to intoxication and allowing a friend to handle his revolver — it had discharged, killing him. Neighbors had heard a family quarrel – the drunken husband had taken the family’s relief check and spent it. The night of the crime, she slashed her four sleeping children while they lay naked in their beds, clubbed her sleeping husband with an axe handle, then slashed her own throat. The husband ran to a window and called for help while assisting the fourth child, an 11-year-old son who was rushed to a hospital. The three dead children were found next to each other on the floor of the apartment.

Culled from: Deadly Intent: Crime and Punishment Photographs from the Burns Archive

MFDJ 06/19/2020: American Savages

Today’s Savage Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On this Juneteenth, I wanted to share a reminder of the brutal, unforgiving horrors that African Americans have had to endure – and a promise that I will not forget those who have suffered or stop sharing their stories.  Say their names: Bessie McCroy, Laura Nelson, Will Green, Daniel Barber, Henry Noles, Jesse Washington.  Let’s evolve, America!

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Neither women nor entire families escaped the savagery of white mobs in early 20th century America. Bessie McCroy, along with her son and daughter, were removed from a jail in Carroll County, Mississippi, and taken to the edge of town, where a crowd of five hundred men hanged them and riddled their bodies with bullets.  Members of a mob in Okemah, Oklahoma, entered the local jail to seize Laura Nelson, accused of murdering a sheriff, then raped the black woman before hanging her along with her teenage son. When a white farmer in Gray, Georgia, was found dead in his home, suspicion fell on Will Green and his seventeen-year-old son. Despite their pleas of innocence, a mob lynched both of them and riddled their bodies with bullets. Authorities subsequently determined that neither the father nor the son had anything to do with the farmer’s death.


Poor Laura Nelson.  R.I.P.


Laura Nelson, her son, and their murderers.

The way whites in Monticello, Georgia, dealt with a black family in 1915 was no doubt meant as a warning to all blacks who dared to challenge white authority. When the local police chief came to the home of Daniel Barber to arrest him on a bootlegging charge, Barber and  his family forcibly resisted the officers. After police subdued and arrested the Barbers, some two hundred enraged whites stormed the jail and dragged Barber, his son, and his two married daughters to a tree in the very center of the black district. The mob chose to hang the entire family, one by one. Daniel Barber had to watch each of his children die before the noose was tightened around his neck.

When permitted to speak before being lynched, some of the victims professed their guilt and asked for forgiveness, while others protested their innocence. Many simply tried to make peace with their God. Before his burning, Henry Noles of Winchester, Tennessee, confessed his crime and asked his friends to “meet him in glory.” He mounted the stump “stolidly” and laughed as the told the mob, “Tell all my sisters and brothers to meet me in glory. I am going to make that my home. Tell my mother to meet me where parting will be no more.” Taken from the stump, he was then chained to a tree and his body saturated with oil. Soon “the quivering body was enveloped in flames.” A lynch mob in Cuthbert, Georgia, agreed to the victim’s request that they take his picture and send it to his sister. She collapsed upon receiving the photo showing him hanging in a tree. Jesse Washington, a black youth, pleaded his innocence with the lynch mob (he had been retried after a judge had expressed doubt over a guilty verdict), but to no avail. The crowd, made up of “the supposed best citizens of the South,” looked on with approval as the flames enveloped the squirming youth. Souvenir hunters then proceeded to hack his body with penknives, carrying away their human loot. One white spectator failed to share the carnival mood of the crowd. “I am a white man, but today is one day that I am certainly sorry that I am one,” he wrote afterward. “I am disgusted with my country.”

The Lynching of Jesse Washington:


R.I.P. Poor Jesse.

Culled from: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

MFDJ 06/18/2020: Reanimated Corpses

Today’s Curious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Why did the body of a murdered man start to bleed profusely when the murderer entered the room, and why was a ghostly rattle of the bones from the tomb of Pope Sylvester II always heard just before the death of a pope?  Why did the hair and nails of some cadavers keep growing after death, and why did some of them even cut new teeth? Who are the more happy, the dead or the living, and are all humans, even the most hideous monsters, resurrected in heaven? These were some of the questions addressed in Dr. Heinrich Kornmann’s curious book De miraculis mortuorum, a treatise on the miracles of the dead, first published in 1610. Among the sections on incorruptible saints, screaming corpses, speaking skulls, and jumping specters in Kornmann’s book is to be found a brief note concerning a certain Cardinal Andreas, who died in Rome and was to be buried in a cathedral, where the pope and a body of clergy attended a service to honor his memory. But during the service the cardinal groaned and sat up in his coffin. This was looked on as a miracle and ascribed to the influence of Saint Jerome, to whom the cardinal was greatly attached. Another note describes the death of Archbishop Geron of Cologne, who was prematurely buried in a tomb in his own cathedral, and expired in the most lamentable manner; his sad fate was deemed just as miraculous as the phenomena discussed earlier.

Another view of the miracles of the dead is given in the German medical practitioner Christian Friedrich Garmann’s similarly titled treatise De miraculis mortuourum.  Like many other seventeenth-century doctors and scientists, he was immensely erudite and preferred the compilation of numerous quotations from the classical literature, and the ancient repositories of curious medical anecdotes, to actual observations by himself or other contemporaries. The first edition of Garmann’s book appeared in 1670, but he kept compiling more and more miracles,so the ultimate version of his book, posthumously published in 1709, was an encyclopedic work of more than twelve hundred pages. It provides a veritable dictionary of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century observations, beliefs and superstitions about the dark underground world of cadavers.

The theme of the still-living dead is even stronger in Garmann’s book. Garmann gives examples of corpses that grew in size, moved, laughed, or wept, corpses whose facial expression changed, and even corpses whose hearts kept on beating. He cites instances of living children delivered from a dead mother by means of cesarean section, so it could be concluded that corpses could give birth. He also reports many observations of corpses with an erect penis. Indeed, when the corpses of dead soldiers were once undressed after a fierce battle, Garmann writes, many of them were in a state as if the engagement had taken place in the bedroom. The concluding forty-five pages of his book deal with the miracles of resuscitated and resurrected corpses. Garmann had read about a certain Zoroaster, who revived on the funeral pyre twelve days after being considered dead, and a boy described by a certain Dr. Valvasor, who came to life when his coffin was put into the grave. The learned Velschius told a story that was well known at the time: when grave robbers dug up the coffin of a recently buried woman in Cologne, she revived as they cut her finger to steal a valuable ring; exactly the same story was current about a young lady from Bohemia. Nowhere in Garmann’s treatise is it concluded that these latter instances should perhaps prompt more careful scrutiny of individuals presumed dead to prevent the interment of still-living people, the events are interpreted as miraculous resurrections rather than as actual rescues from the tomb.

Culled from: Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

 

Prisoner Du Jour!

Prisoners: Murder, Mayhem, and Petit Larceny is a collection of seventy portraits of turn-of-the-century prisoners in the town of Marysville, California and the fascinating contemporary newspaper and prison accounts describing the crimes of which they were accused. The photos themselves are more fascinating than most of the crimes. There’s something magical about glass plate negatives that you just can’t reproduce with modern photography.  And I think people just had more character back in the day – or at least it seems that way.

Check out today’s fresh-faced young fellow!


Chas. McMahon

M’MAHON MUST ANSWER FOR CRIME
HIS COMPANION IS RELEASED BUT GETS SENTENCED FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT.

Charles McMahon and Harry Wilson had their preliminary examinations in the Police Court last evening on a charge of grand larceny. McMahon was held to answer before the Superior Court with bail fixed at $2000, but Wilson was discharged, there being insufficient evidence to connect him with the crime.

The offense charged was that of robbing John Kelly while all three men were drinking at the Cliff House on election day.


(Note: This Cliff House, in Yuba City – not the San Francisco one! – DeSpair)

The case was complete against McMahon; the watch stolen from Kelly being found in his pocket and there being plenty more evidence to connect him with the robbery.

Wilson took the stand in his own behalf and claimed he was not at the Cliff House at the time the robbery was committed. There as not sufficient evidence, in the estimation of the Court, to offset this testimony.

McMahon was unable to furnish bail and was taken to the County Jail this morning. Wilson and McMahon had been “floated” from this city after being convicted of vagrancy, and when Wilson was released from the grand larceny charge he was at once arrested and charged with contempt of Court, for which he got a sentence of four months in the County Jail this morning. [November 10, 1906]

CHARLES M’MAHON ACQUITTED
Charles McMahon, who was charged with grand larceny on election day, November 6th, appeared for trial in the Superior Court at 10 o’clock yesterday morning.

John Kelly, a blacksmith, who swore to the complaint, accused McMahon of having stolen his watch and chain.

District Attorney Brittan represented the people and Attorneys Wallace Dinsmore and E. B. Stanwood appeared for the defendant.

When Kelly, who is known as “Baldy” Kelly by his friends in Sutter County [some friends! – DeSpair], was called to the witness stand, it was evidently apparent that he was under the influence of liquor and made several contradictory statements to those made when he swore to the complaint. He stated that he had told McMahon to take the watch and chain and keep it for him and made several other contradictory statements evidently trying to shield McMahon.

Judge McDaniel could not help but notice his condition and when the noon hour arrived and the jury had retired he ordered Kelly to be brought before the Court, when he adjudged him guilty of contempt in appearing before the Court in a drunken condition and ordered that he be confined in the County Jail for twenty-four hours.  When that time expires it is expected that District Attorney Brittan will have him rearrested on a charge of perjury.

The following other witnesses were examined: Deputy Sheriff J. G. Cannon and Constable W. H. Chism of Sutter county, who testified as to the arrest of McMahon and the finding of Kelly’s watch in his pocket. He was very drunk at the time.

The names of Joseph R. Williams, Henry Reed and W.A. Bevan, employees of Shattuck and Desmond on the pile driver near the Cliff House at that time, were called and as they did not respond, a bench warrant was issued for their arrest. Those men it was claimed were eye witnesses to the robbery.

Attorney Wallace Dinsmore in order to not cause delay, agreed to have their testimony given at the preliminary examination read to the jury, and the District Attorney read the testimony. Two of the missing witnesses had testified that they saw Kelly rolled on the porch of the Cliff House on election day and saw his watch and chain taken. This happened between the hours of 8 and 11 o’clock in the morning on that day.

The prosecution then rested.

Charles McMahon was the first witness on his own behalf to take the stand and he stated that Kelly and himself were at work on the Marcuse ranch in Sutter county and they came into Yuba City the day before election. On election day they went to the Cliff House, had several drinks and then Kelly went to sleep. He hit him with his hat a few times on the head and tried to wake him up. Kelly when he woke up told McMahon to leave him alone and keep the watch for him. He had taken the watch not with the intention of stealing it, but to keep it for his friend Kelly. On cross examination he admitted having been in the Wittier Reform School.

John J. Black of Yuba City testified that he heard Kelly tell McMahon to keep the watch for him.

Attorney Dinsmore then asked the Court to instruct the jury to acquit the defendant. Judge McDaniel advised the jury to bring in a verdict of not guilty and had handed to them a form of verdict.

When the jury returned into Court five minutes later Foreman J. O. Gates handed in a verdict of not guilty and the prisoner was ordered discharged.

Ten minutes after McMahon was released last evening, he was placed under arrest by Officer Sayles on a charge of contempt, McMahon having been arrested for vagrancy last March and given a “floater” and then having come back to Marysville. The grand larceny charge that was placed against him was alleged to have been committed at the Cliff House and by being at that place the young man violated his floater. Hew as tried before Judge Raish in the Police Court this morning and Attorneys Dinsmore and Stanwood who defended him in the Superior Court appeared in his behalf. On the promise that McMahon would reform and cease to be a trouble to his relatives and the officers [suckers! – DeSpair] his fine was placed at $20, which was paid and he was released.  [December 7, 1906]

PRIOR AND SUBSEQUENT CRIMES

October 10, 1905
DRANK CARBOLIC ACID BUT SOON RECOVERED
Dr. G. W. Stratton was summoned to John Peters’ ranch in Sutter county about 5 o’clock on Sunday evening, Charles McMahon, one of the employees having taken a dose of carbolic acid. The remedies administered were very effective and the doctor returned to this city with his patient about 7:30 the same evening.

March 17, 1906
NEWS EPITOMIZED
Charles Sharkey, alias Jack Williams, and Charles McMahon were arrested last evening after they had handled a Jap in a very rough manner. It is thought they attempted to rob him and the matter was being more thoroughly investigated this afternoon.

January 4, 1907
IN THE POLICE COURT
Charles McMahon was charged with petty larceny having stolen a pair of corduroy trousers from M. Schwab’s store of the value of $2.50. He at first pleaded not guilty and stated that he wanted to consult a lawyer. He, however, changed his mind in a few minutes and entered a plea of guilty and waived time.
Judge Raish ordered him confined in the County Jail for four months.
It will be remembered that McMahon was recently tried in the Superior Court and acquitted on a charge of stealing a watch. His attorneys, Wallace Disnmore and E. B. Stanwood, made a successful fight on his behalf. They probably did not expect that he would so soon again commit a crime and admit his guilt.

June 9, 1907
IN THE POLICE COURT
Charles McMahon was charged under the State law with indecent exposure. His offense was so aggravating that after being convicted he was ordered confined in the county jail for three months.

September 13, 1907
HELD FOR GRAND LARCENY
Fred Roland and Charles McMahon, who were charged with grand larceny, had their preliminary hearing yesterday afternoon.
The men were accused of stealing a watch from Martin Daley last Sunday. Roland stated that he was responsible for the theft and made a statement clearing McMahon. Roland was held over to the Superior Court with bail fixed at $1500 and McMahon was discharged.

I did some sleuthing of my own and found his boyhood crime.  He was always good-for-nuthin’, that Charles!

From the October 7, 1898 Sutter County Farmer

MFDJ 06/14/2020: The Fool Defending Himself

Today’s Foolish Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Today we continue with the final part of our three-part tale of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, as told by my friend, true crime historian, David Kulczyk. (Catch up on Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)

It is a timeworn anecdote that a person who represents himself in court has a fool for an attorney. One of the first things that Northcott did when his trial started was to fire his attorneys. The demented killer believed that he was smart enough to get himself acquitted on his own. Plus, acting as his own attorney gave Northcott freedom of movement around the jail and access to interview witnesses in private. Thus began one of the most bizarre and confusing trials in California history.

Northcott wasted the court’s time by requesting a change in venue, demanding more females on the jury, and subpoenaing over sixty people, including Christine Collins, the mother of Walter Collins and the victim of police brutality when she was locked up in a mental ward for trying to prove that Arthur Hutchins, Jr. was not her son. The only thing that Northcott accomplished was to to get the original judge disqualified.

Northcott loved the attention he was receiving, and when advised by an attorney that he would hang himself by acting in his own defense, Northcott replied, “Well, it would be worth it. My name will become known all over the world.”


Northcott acting as his own lawyer.

The trial started on January 15, 1929, and was presided over by the Honorable George Freeman. Judge Freeman did the best he could to conceal his loathing for Northcott and proceeded with as fair a trial as a maniac like Northcott could receive.

Special Prosecutor Loyal C. Kelly put Sanford Clark on the stand, and he testified that Gordon had him dig three graves that were originally for the Dahls. He described how the boys were brought to the ranch, stripped, and tied down onto filthy cots in the shed. In detail, he put into plain words how Northcott would rape, beat, and torture the poor boys until he tired of them, which usually took about a week. He’d then whack the poor kid in the head with his axe. He told the court how Northcott, under the threat of death, made him hit Lewis Winslow in the head with a double-bladed axe in front of the grave that he had dug earlier. He reported to the court that he saw his uncle carrying a bucket with the Mexican boy’s head in it. One of the most heartbreaking moments during the trial was when it was exposed that Northcott made the tortured Winslow boys write a letter to their parents explaining that they ran away from home. Clark testified that as soon as the boys were done with the letters, they were killed. He also told the court about how they dug up the bodies and that Northcott told him that he reburied the bodies fifty miles out in the desert.

When cross-examined, Clark held his own against his evil uncle’s inane questioning. Northcott jutted his jaw and made theatrical gestures, but he could not jar the teenager’s testimony.


Gordon Northcott, right, questions Rex Welch, analytical expert, about bloodstains on a bucket introduced as evidence in a photograph published Jan. 28, 1929.

The detectives were on the stand next, and the amount of evidence against Northcott was overwhelming – bloody clothing that was identified by the families of the missing boys, murder weapons, and Northcott’s own confession, which he had recklessly blurted out to his jailers while incarcerated. Northcott turned pale when the confession was read in court. The entry as evidence of a couple of bushel baskets of human bone fragments raked up from his ranch did not help his case.

Northcott’s sister, niece, father, and mother were brought in to testify, and their testimony did nothing to help his case. Cyrus told him to just admit that he was guilty. Sarah Northcott, more pasty faced and drawn-looking than before she went to prison, could only cry on the stand. She told the court between sobs that she was guilty of all the crimes, but nobody believed her, and she was quickly led back to prison.


Northcott in the distance and his mother (or is it his grandmother) Sarah in the foreground.

Northcott’s sister Winnie Clark was brought in from Canada at the state’s expense for the defendant’s case, only to be accused by Northcott of being his mother. Eventually the truth came out that Gordon Northcott was the product of an incestuous relationship between his father Cyrus and Winnie. His father was also his grandfather. Although shocking, the revelation didn’t help his case.

It didn’t go well for Northcott as he asked his niece, Sarah Clark, questions that only incriminated himself. A fine example of Northcott’s idiotic defense happened when he asked Winnie how she knew that he gave her a black eye. “Because you punched me in the eye with your fist,” she replied.

Gordon Northcott’s trial ended with him questioning himself, turning his head one way when questioning and the other way when answering. He ended up pleading for his life.

The jury was taken to the Chicken Ranch and given a tour. They saw the bloody steps that led to the killing room. They saw the room where the boys were tortured. They saw the empty graves.

The twenty-seven-day trial ended when the jury came back with the guilty verdict after deliberating for less than two and a half hours. Gordon Northcott was sentenced to death by hanging.


Northcott playing solitaire in prison.

The trial enraged the citizens of Riverside County. On February 10, a mob approached the jail and demanded to be allowed to lynch Northcott. Sheriff Clem Sweeters calmly talked the men out of it and sent them on their way. Before that, on January 2, 1929, Henry Espazo went to Riverside County jail and asked to visit Northcott. Suspicious deputies frisked the country store shopkeeper and found a semi-automatic pistol. He was arrested for being an alien with a firearm.

After the usual appeals and legal tricks ran out, Gordon Northcott was still psychotically confident. He didn’t let up on his shenanigans. He taunted officials about more bodies and sent them on wild goose chases. On his last evening, he agreed to meet with Christine Collins to answer any questions that she may have about the death of her son, Walter. It was the only time a woman was ever allowed into a death row jail cell in San Quentin’s history. But Northcott was his usual glib self and only told her to ask his mother, father, or Sanford Clark for information.


Christine Collins confronting Northcott.

An hour before Northcott was to be executed on October 2, 1939, he told the warden that he had taken poison to beat the rope. They immediately pumped his stomach but found no traces of any kind of poison.

The Ape Boy’s playful and unrealistic self-confidence changed as he was led from his death row cell to the gallows of San Quentin,. He was so nervous about his execution that he had to be blindfolded for his dead man’s stroll. He was the first man to be blindfolded before he stood on the gallows in San Quentin history. On the short walk, he collapsed and had to be supported by two guards.

As the noose was being adjusted around his neck, Northcott uttered his last words.

“Don’t, don’t,” he said pathetically.

Northcott fainted just as the trapdoor was sprung and the slack rope failed to break his neck. It took thirteen minutes for the Ape Boy to strangle to death.

The aftermath of the terrible crimes reverberated throughout the country. The town of Wineville was so embarrassed by the attention that it received from Northcott and the murders that on November 1, 1930, its name was changed to Mira Loma. The authorities were sure that there were at least twenty other Northcott victims buried out in the desert or thrown down an abandoned mineshaft. Anxious parents with missing children demanded that the police check out every lead.

In 2008, Clint Eastwood directed the film The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich. The film focused on Christine Collins, her search for her son and the abuse that she suffered at the hands of the police.

Sarah Northcott was released form prison after serving only twelve years of her sentence. She slipped into obscurity as had the bodies of her grandson’s victims.

Culled from: Death in California: The Bizarre, Freakish, and Just Curious Ways People Die in the Golden State by David Kulczyk

MFDJ 06/13/2020: The Changeling

Today’s Gore-Crusted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Today we continue with part two of a three-part tale of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, as told by my friend, true crime historian, David Kulczyk. (Catch up on Part 1 here.)

Cryus and Sarah Northcott bought the ranch for Gordon to keep him out of trouble. In 1925, Gordon had been reprimanded by a judge for an unnamed statutory offense with a twelve-year-old boy. Love letters found on the ranch revealed that the boy was the child of an elderly and wealthy resident of the old-money Los Angeles neighborhood known as Highland Park. The police would not disclose the name of the person or the child. More importantly, Cyrus told police that his son would drive into Los Angeles and go from door to door asking young teenage males if they wanted to earn some money working on his farm. The old man had no idea how many people his son had waylaid and murdered in this way. He told the police that he may have taken many of his victims to the miner’s cabin in the Mint Canyon.

Riverside County sheriff Clem Sweeters and his investigators combed through the isolated chicken ranch, finding more human bone fragments and a kneecap. All were from the bodies of adolescent males. The police believed that the graves had been dug up and the bodies torn apart. A buzzard circling a few hundred feet away from the ranch caught the attention of the searchers. There officers found a blood-stained flour sack with two human pelvises inside.


Bone fragments unearthed at the Wineville “murder farm”.

A search of the miner’s cabin in Mint Valley would yield more gruesome artifacts like fragments of ankles, fingers, toes, and leg bones. A piece of human skull was also sifted from the dirt. In a fire pit, the police found the remains of shoes.


A piece of parietal skull bone.

Walter Collins’ father identified tattered remains of clothing as those of his son, which put the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in a dilemma. Arthur Hutchins, Jr., a twelve- year-old runaway from Iowa, had tricked the police into believing that he was nine-year-old Walter Collins. When he was picked up in Illinois, the police asked him if he was Collins. Wanting to get a free trip to California, Hutchins pretended that he was the missing boy. When Walter’s mother, Christine Collins, was shown the boy, she immediately told Captain J. J. Jones that it wasn’t her son. To placate the despondent mother, Captain Jones told her to try him out for a couple weeks.


Walter Collins (left) and Arthur Hutchins, Jr. (right).

After three weeks, Christine Collins went to the police station with her son’s dental and medical records to prove that Hutchins was not her son. Captain Jones responded by institutionalizing Mrs. Collins in a mental hospital. She was released after ten days, when her son’s clothing was discovered and identified. Arthur Hutchins, Jr. was sent back to the Iowa authorities.


Poor Christine Collins. Her story was told in the Clint Eastwood movie “The Changeling”.


Boy Scout Uniform belonging to Walter Collins, found at the murder farm.

Sarah Louisa Northcott was captured without incident in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and shipped off to Vancouver for extradition. Gordon Northcott, who was thought to be traveling disguised as a female, was captured at almost the same time in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. Gordon Northcott began a process of grandstanding to the media that would continue throughout his trial. A tall and ungainly man, Northcott could look like a serious college student one moment and a mentally defective person the next. The lipstick-wearing killer couldn’t keep his mouth shut and denied all charges against him. While in custody, Northcott told so many stories that the court believed that he was preparing to plead insanity. He said that he would fight extradition, but the Canadian authorities had no problem turning over the demented couple to California police and Gordon found himself on a long train ride, sandwiched between two burly detectives from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

Sarah Northcott, shriveled and hideous, looked far older than her sixty years. Her deep love for her son bordered on insanity. She wanted to take the blame for all the murders, but she ended up being convicted only of the murder of Walter Collins, through the testimony of her grandson, Sanford Clark. The teenager had witnessed his grandmother axing the Collins boy in the head while he was tied down to the gore-crusted cot. In one of the quickest trials in Riverside County history, Sarah was sentenced on December 31, 1928, to life in the Tehachapi State Prison.


Sarah “A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother” Northcott


The Ax Sarah used to murder Walter Collins
(And isn’t it nice for a mother to take such an interest in her son’s hobbies?)

[ To be continued…]

Culled from: Death in California: The Bizarre, Freakish, and Just Curious Ways People Die in the Golden State by David Kulczyk

MFDJ 06/12/2020: Introducing the Ape Boy

Today’s Apelike Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Today we begin a three-part tale of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, as told by my friend, true crime historian, David Kulczyk.

At first the detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department couldn’t believe the tales that fourteen-year-old Canadian Sanford Clark was telling them. At the request of the American consulate in Vancouver, Canada, the detectives picked up the teenager to look into his well-being. His sister was concerned about him after she had visited him at their cousin’s chicken ranch in Wineville, a small hamlet located in the northeast corner of Riverside County.


Sanford Clark

Clark told police that he had been kidnapped from his home in Saskatchewan in 1926 and was kept at the decrepit ranch against his will. He breathlessly told the investigators tales of kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder, all committed by his uncle, twenty-one-year-old Gordon Stewart Northcott. He claimed that his uncle threatened to kill him if he told authorities about the happenings at the farm.


The Grim Compound

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department contacted the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, and the two teams jointly inspected the now-abandoned ranch. Investigators quickly lost their skepticism as well as their lunches. The run-down, three-acre compound on the edge of the desert was definitely a crime scene. Police found bloodstained stairs, cots, a bloody axe, a hatchet embedded with human hair, a blood-stained bucket, and three recently exhumed, gore-soaked, shallow graves. One of the quicklime-lined graves had the imprints of two small bodies in the dirt at the bottom, while the other had an impression of one small body. Bone fragments were scattered all over the ranch and surrounding area, and many of them were obviously human. Most incriminating of all were articles of clothing that were easily traced to three recently missing boys and an unidentified teenage body found in nearby Norco.


Excavating the graves

Nine-year-old Walter Collins had gone to see a movie on March 10, 1928, and never returned. Tattered remnants of his clothing were found in what turned out to have been Northcott’s torture room. It was in this room where Collins – along with brothers Lewis and Nelson Winslow, who were last seen on May 16 – were subjected to sexual assault, sadistic beatings, and finally death. Clark told the police that Northcott had either lured the boys to the death ranch with a promise of work or just plain kidnapped them. His ape-like uncle then overpowered them, tore their clothes off, and tied them face down on a cot, where he raped and tortured them for a week before he tired of them.


Walter Collins

Sanford Clark pointed out everything to the detectives. He told them that there was at least one other boy killed at the ranch while he was enslaved there, a Hispanic teenager who was raped and tortured for a week before he was shot and decapitated. Northcott made Clark carry his decapitated head to a shed in the blood-stained bucket.


The Atrocity Exhibition

The first to die in front of Clark was the Hispanic boy, who had been hiding near a miner’s cabin in the Mint Valley. Northcott knew a miner who lived there and would often go visit him. One day the miner’s partner showed up and the two men argued over profits. Northcott gladly helped his miner friend kill his partner. While the men looked for a convenient hole to throw the hapless prospector into, they found the Hispanic boy hiding in an old mineshaft. Believing that the boy had seen the murder, Northcott took him back to his ranch and raped, beat, and tortured him for a week, before the miner came back to the ranch and allegedly murdered the hapless teen with a .22 caliber rifle that was also found at the ranch. His head was chopped off to forestall identification.

The police knew about a headless torso of a Hispanic teenager that had been found on February 2 alongside the road outside of the nearby community of Norco; there was a .22 caliber bullet wound in the body, which was never identified.

Clark told the police that he had originally dug the two graves for a married couple who were interested in working at the ranch. The couple, known as the Dahls, went to the ranch, but became frightened after they were asked to wait on the front porch of the house while Northcott and his mother, Sarah Louisa Northcott, argued. After listening to the quarreling couple for two hours, the couple quietly got into their car and left.

The police put out an all-points-bulletin for the capture of Gordon, his mother, and his father. Not long after putting Clark into protective custody, police arrested Gordon’s sixty-four-year-old father, Cyrus George Northcott, in Los Angeles.

The elderly Northcott couldn’t keep his mouth shut while being interrogated, telling investigators that he moved from Canada to California to get away from his family, but they found out where he was and moved in with him. The old carpenter claimed that his son told him about the murders, but he said he didn’t believe anything Gordon said. The old man told the police that his wife and son attempted to kill him several times, the last attempt occurring just a month earlier.

Cyrus called his son an ape man, claiming that Gordon’s body was covered with three-inch-long hair. The press jumped on the nickname and from there on always referred to Gordon as Ape Boy in the headlines.


The Ape Boy

[ To be continued…]

Culled from: Death in California: The Bizarre, Freakish, and Just Curious Ways People Die in the Golden State by David Kulczyk