MFDJ 09/24/23: Death of a “Sissy”

Today’s Well-Dressed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In a story that, up to a point, oddly presaged a “Leave It To Beaver” plot by some 25 years, 7-year-old John Tighe set out from his home in the posh Philadelphia suburb of Germantown on Mother’s Day, 1937. The young lad was going to pay his respects to his grandmother in nearby West Philadelphia. He was dressed for the occasion in the height of juvenile splendor: spiffy blue suit, neat tie and, the pièce de résistance, a red carnation.

Dandy little Johnny

Yet, somewhere along the way, the innocent gamin was led astray. The agent of temptation was one 9-year-old James Brady, who would be described by the police as an “incorrigible” lad. But James was not the typical dirty-faced street urchin. He had a genuine brush with celebrity. The previous summer, he’d written President Roosevelt a heart-rending letter, describing how he’d worn out his only pair of shoes trying to see the President speak at Franklin Field. The tale touched FDR’s heart and his press agent’s promotional instincts. A complimentary pair of shoes was dispatched from Hyde Park to Philly pronto.

Little Jimmy Showing His Resting-Sociopath Face

They must have made an odd pair, wandering into the Woodlands Cemetery on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Jimmy of the well worn presidential shoes and the younger child of privilege, resplendent in his Sunday best. But there was a method to Jimmy’s madness. The younger boy’s outfit had already branded him.  “He was a sissy,” Jimmy would later tell police. And Jimmy could not abide a sissy.

When the boy didn’t show at his grandmother’s, police first suspected a kidnapping. But with the help of witnesses, they closed in quickly on Jimmy. At first Jimmy denied everything, telling a succession of stories that only increased in implausibility. Finally, he confessed, leading them to the spot on the riverbank where he pushed the boy in.

Culled from: Murder Can Be Fun #17 by John Marr

The newspaper articles about this murder have some delightful details.

From the May 12, 1937 Courier-Post (Camden, New Jersey):

MOTHER OF VICTIM BEGS TO SEE KILLER

Police Ponder Request to Question Boy Who Admitted Drowning

Grief-stricken, Mrs. John Tighe, mother of John Tighe, Jr., 7, begged for a chance yesterday to question Jimmy Brady, 9, the youngster who calmly admitted he had drowned her son because he “was a sissy.”

“If you’ll only let me talk to him,” pleaded the mother. “I know I can make him tell me the truth and end this awful suspense.”

As police debate whether to grant the request, Jimmy, cool, matter-of-fact youngster, termed “normal” by psychiatrists, sits in the house of detention, eating heartily, joining lustily in the group-singing, and baffling police by constantly shifting his stories.

Twice he has changed his account of the tragedy. First he pointed to a spot near the University avenue bridge, saying he had thrown the Tighe boy into the Schuylkill there. Later he placed the spot fully half a mile away.

“I pushed him in right there… or was it a half-mile down the river?”

Thirty policemen and the harbor patrol dragged the river yesterday, but did not find the body. Police are skeptical of Brady’s statement regarding the drowning, although, together with the victim’s parents, they believe young Tighe is dead.

“Something tells me,” said Mrs. Tighe, “his body is lying in the woods or the cemetery.”

Johnny was last seen wandering with young Brady Sunday afternoon in Woodlands cemetery, Thirty-ninth street and Woodland avenue, not far from the home of Johnny’s grandmother, Mrs. John J. Doyle, at 3921 Baltimore avenue. He had spent Mother’s Day there at a family reunion.

Yesterday his father spent hours searching empty tombs and subterranean vaults in the old graveyard [Lucky! – DeSpair], half convinced he would come across his boy’s body. He found a heavy carpet beater, with which the Brady boy was playing Sunday afternoon. Wisps of hair were found on it, but detectives said they were certain it was dog’s hair. Nevertheless, they planned a microscopic examination.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists at the house of detention gave young Brady a thorough examination and pronounced him mentally normal, but backward.

Dr. Donald Davidson said:

“He is normal, in that he is not feeble-minded or insane, but his record shows him to be a very troublesome boy.”

James has been in trouble before. He was arrested for stealing and selling some empty beer bottles and for climbing through an open window into a University of Pennsylvania fraternity house. He was released on probation, after another spell of notoriety.

Then, last Friday, he was accused of striking a woman and, police say, was sentenced in Municipal Court to an indeterminate term in LaSalle Reform School. He was not in Court when sentence was pronounced, and a warrant for his arrest was issued. It had not been served when he was picked up in connection with Johnny’s disappearance.

A charge of homicide has been lodged against him, but police have not determined their procedure in the event Johnny’s body is recovered.

James lives on Baltimore avenue, near Twenty-ninth street, one of several children. He’s a pupil in a public school disciplinary class. He was not a playmate of the missing boy.

Johnny, who lives at 148 East Tulpehocken street, was frail as a result of an automobile accident two years ago. Young Tighe saw James only when he went to visit his grandmother. Members of his family say he was told not to play with James.

James’ parents yesterday repeated their assertion that they do not believe their son’s story.

“He would say anything if you would listen to him long enough,” said his father, John Brady.  [Something tells me the rotten apple didn’t roll far from the tree. – DeSpair]

On May 15, 1937 John’s body was recovered (Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise):

Body of Boy Drowned in Schuylkill River Found

(By the Associated Press)

PHILADELPHIA, May 15.—The body of seven-year-old John Tighe, Jr. was recovered today from the Schuylkill river.

Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Summerscale said it was found near the spot where James Brady, 9, told him he pushed the boy into the stream on Mother’s day.

Brady, once given a pair of shoes by President Roosevelt, was held in the house of detention while police searched for the body.

Summerscale said Brady told him the boys were playing and he pushed John toward the river twice to frighten him, the third time his hand slipped and John fell in.

And then on July 2, 1937 in The Plain Speaker (Hazleton, PA):

Youth Branded Cold Killer

Boy Who Shoved Another Into River and Called Him “Sissy” Sentenced.

PHILADELPHIA, July 2. (AP) — Nine-year-old James Brady, charged with the “sissy” murder of seven-year-old John S. Tighe, Jr., today was committed to the juvenile branch of the Allentown State Institute for Mental Defectives. [Why don’t we have catchy names like that anymore? – DeSpair]

Brady was charged with shoving the Tighe boy into the Schuylkill river on last Mother’s Day because he thought the youngster was a “sissy” for wearing a carnation. Tighe’s body was recovered several days later.

“The reports had by me,” said Judge Frank Smith in quarter sessions court, “indicate that this boy is cold-blooded, cruel and unemotional and is known as a ‘constitutional’ psychopath.’

“Dr. D. G. Davidson, psychiatrist at the House of Detention, reports young Brady shows no remorse at all for what he had done to John Tighe, Jr. Dr. Davidson states that this is due to a brutal impulse and doubts that Brady actually tried to kill Tighe, but that it was his aim to see him squirm and struggle, due to a sadistic trait in his character.”

Dr. Edwin B. Twitmyer, a psychiatrist appointed by the court at the request of defense counsel, reported “Brady is feebleminded with a mental age of seven years.”

 

Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!

FELIX WEHRLE

Chas. Eisenmann photographed several rubber-skinned men, including James Morris, “The Indian Rubber Man,” a contemporary of Felix Wehrle’s. Wehrle’s career seems to have been overshadowed by Morris’s more spectacular feats. An Eisenmann portrait in the files of the Museum of the City of New York shows that Morris was able to pull the skin of his throat up over his eyes, an achievement that won him long-standing contracts with various Barnum shows. Wehrle was apparently left with the museum circuit where he did contortions along with skin stretching. Both men suffered from the Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a defect of the connective tissues of the dermis characterized by thin, delicate hyperextensible skin. Wehrle is known to have been able to bend his fingers over backwards, an anomaly associated with the syndrome. Indeed the joints are so lax in many people with this pathology that they frequently suffer from dislocations. Although these men could perform painlessly they had to do so with care to avoid bruising and hemorrhaging, since the blood vessels are composed of the same faulty connective tissue that permit the stretching. The Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is inherited as a dominant.

Eisenmann’s portrait of Wehrle is curiously similar to that of Morris. In each case the subject is shown from the waist up in three-quarter views before a plain backdrop. The two almost identically dressed men go through their paces for the camera with similar matter-of-factness.

James Morris

Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age