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126 pages

English

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Sure to capture the imagination of devotees of true crime and the occultThis anthology of thirteen true crime stories includes the mysterious slaying of Charles Walton, who was found slashed and pierced to death in an area notorious for its associations with black magic; the murder of Eric Tombe, whose body was located because of a recurring dream in which his mother saw Eric down a well; the terrorizing of Hammersmith, London, in the early nineteenth century by the nocturnal appearance of a "ghost"; the Salem witchcraft trials; the murder of Rasputin, who was believed by some in Russia to be a miracle worker and by others to be a dangerous charlatan; a Scottish tale in which evidence given by the ghost of the victim was allowed at the murderer's trial; and the bizarre goings-on at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York, where Ronnie DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family-the new occupants were subjected to all manner of sinister events, including the presence of poltergeists, or were they?

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True crime

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	05 janvier 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781612779386
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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The Supernatural Murders
TRUE CRIME HISTORY SERIES
Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts
James Jessen Badal
Tracks to Murder
Jonathan Goodman
Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome
Albert Borowitz
Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a
Literary Phenomenon
Robin Odell
The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First
Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair
Diana Britt Franklin
Murder on Several Occasions
Jonathan Goodman
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories
Elizabeth A. De Wolfe
Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist
Andrew Rose
Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of
Donald Ring Mellett
Thomas Crowl
Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon
Albert Borowitz
The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the
Gilded Age
Virginia A. McConnell
Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones
Jan Bondeson
Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That
Gripped a Nation
James G. Hollock
Murder and Martial Justice: Spying, “Terrorism,” and Retribution
in Wartime America
Meredith Lentz Adams
The Christmas Murders: Classic True Crime Stories
Edited by Jonathan Goodman
The Supernatural Murders: Classic True Crime Stories
Edited by Jonathan Goodman
The Supernatural Murders
Classic True Crime Stories
Edited by
JONATHAN GOODMAN
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2011 by the Estate of Jonathan Goodman
All rights reserved First published in 1992 by Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd., London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2011003224
ISBN 978-1-60635-083-6
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The supernatural murders : classic true crime stories / edited by Jonathan Goodman. p. cm. — (True crime history series) ISBN 978-1-60635-083-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Occultism—History. 2. Murder—History. I. Goodman, Jonathan. BF1439.S87 2011 364.152’3—dc22 2011003224
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1
For Jean Bloomfield, ‘the weird lady,’ with love
Contents
Preface Albert Borowitz
Bumps in the Night — an introduction
A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day Ivan Butler
The Widow of Hardscrabble Albert Borowitz
Prophesies of Doom Bram Stoker
The Well and the Dream Richard Whittington-Egan
An Astrological Postscript William Henry
Calling Madame Isherwood … Edmund Pearson
A Surfeit of Spirits Jonathan Goodman (compiler)
Amityville Revisited Jeffrey Bloomfield
The Ghost of Sergeant Davies William Roughead
Devils in the Flesh Rayner Heppenstall
The Hand of God or Somebody Jonathan Goodman
Defending the ‘Witch-Burners’ Edmund Pearson
Postscript:
The Trial of Susanna Martin Cotton Mather
The Protracted Murder of Gregory Rasputin Lady Lucy Wingfield
The Gutteridge Murder W. Teignmouth Shore
Acknowledgements and Sources
Preface
ALBERT BOROWITZ
JONATHAN GOODMAN was determined to make The Supernatural Murders the spookiest of his true crime anthologies; he selected “accounts of killings … that were certainly or possibly sparked off by diverse beliefs about unearthly power on earth — or that were certainly or possibly brought to light by perhaps transcendent means — or that either gave rise to superstitions or legends, or acted as reminders, revivers, of old ones.” It should be noted that Goodman, ordinarily one of the most precise of crime historians, sounds consistently a note of doubt or ambiguity. “Certainly or possibly,” he suggests twice, and adds “perhaps,” emphasizing the vagueness that is often at the very core of the supernatural.
If Goodman’s introduction did not advise them otherwise, readers who are not already familiar with his other collections might be inclined to believe that his inclusion of thirteen articles in The Supernatural Murders was intended as a reference to one of our most popular superstitions. Goodman observes that his habit of choosing thirteen cases for each anthology was actually established much earlier in his career.
The Supernatural Murders begins with “A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day,” briefly relating the killing of a farm laborer, Charles Walton, on Valentine’s Day 1945 in an area of Warwickshire famous for witchcraft. A celebrated detective, “Fabian of the Yard” (Detective Inspector, later Superintendent Robert Fabian), believed that a farmer, Albert Potter, killed Walton when pressed for payment of a debt and then embellished his crime with “counterfeit presentments of witchery.”
In 1924 and 1925, a serial poisoner, Martha Wise, devastated the ranks of her family in rural Medina County, near Cleveland, Ohio. My article, “The Widow of Hardscrabble,” quotes Wise as having told a reporter in a prison interview that her crimes were instigated by the devil. However, after her conviction, she blamed the poisoning scheme on her lover.
From the pages of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, Goodman culls “Prophesies of Doom,” an account of the murderous exploits of Madame Voisin in seventeenth-century France’s Age of Arsenic. La Voisin’s originality lay in her combining skills in two specialties: fortune-telling and toxicology. She developed an uncanny knack for predicting with accuracy the longevity of unwanted husbands, and for making her prognostications come true.
The discovery through a dream vision of the actual location of a corpse was a remarkable feature of the famous murder of Maria Marten in Polstead, England. However, since that case had been included in The Country House Murders, Goodman selected for the present volume Richard Whittington-Egan’s “The Well and the Dream,” a lesser-known example of the dreaming mind as sleuth. In 1922 Eric Tombe went missing. Night after night his sleeping mother saw her son’s dead body lying at the bottom of a well, and she brought her fears to the sympathetic attention of Superintendent Francis Carlin, one of Scotland Yard’s “Big Four.” The police dug out disused wells at the burnt farmhouse of Eric Tombe’s crooked partner, Ernest Dyer, and confirmed the accuracy of Mrs. Tombe’s dreams by finding her son’s body. Since Dyer had previously been killed in an arrest for an unrelated crime, the murder case remains unsolved. Goodman adds “An Astrological Postscript,” by William Henry, who finds Dyer’s guilt consistent with the planets.
One of America’s most celebrated true crime writers of the twentieth century, Edmund Pearson, is represented by two short articles in contrasting moods. “Calling Madame Isherwood …” recalls a moment of priceless wit in a prosecutor’s cross-examination of a practicing medium who had taken the stand, so she said, only after being authorized to do so by the spirit of a murder victim. “What kind of a spirit was it?” the prosecutor asked. “A plump spirit, above five feet high?” The argument of Pearson’s second piece, “Defending the ‘Witch-Burners,’“ is advanced in earnest — that “we cannot afford to say much about the Salem witches if we chance to live where the custom of lynching Negroes, often innocent Negroes, is extenuated today.” (Goodman appends Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witchcraft trial of Susanna Martin.)
Goodman contributes two excellent pieces to the collection. The first, “A Surfeit of Spirits,” is his compilation of records and press clippings concerning an epidemic of ghost sightings in early nineteenth-century Hammersmith that terminated in a homicide. Francis Smith, in nocturnal pursuit of a reported spectre, shot to death the white-clad Thomas Milyard, who failed to respond when challenged. After he was convicted of murder, Smith’s death sentence was commuted to a year’s imprisonment. Goodman supplies a happy, though fictional, ending.
A second article by Goodman, “The Hand of God or Somebody,” recalls hangings that went awry, including two failed attempts to execute John Lee. The hangman, James Berry, blamed deficient ironwork catches of the trapdoors, but nonconforming preachers sermonized that God had intervened to spare Lee. Jonathan Goodman offers still another hypothesis: “The ‘Hand of God’ theory seems less credible than a ‘Hand of Satan’ one.”
In “Amityville Revisited” Jeffrey Bloomfield expresses outrage that the site of a real horror is now better known for the dubious account of subsequent visitations by poltergeists and demons. In December 1975, Ronnie DeFeo Jr. was sentenced to life imprisonment after conviction for murdering his parents and four siblings in the family’s residence. Bloomfield notes that following the vacation of the haunted premises by the Lutzes, whose afflictions by evil spirits were detailed in The Amityville Horror, “the house has been inhabited by an apparently still-happy family.” The new owner, James Cromarty, commented: “Nothing weird ever happened except for people coming by because of the book and the movie.” On May 24, 2010, Newsday reported that the house was back on the market, listed at $1.15 million.
The art of William Roughead, master of Scottish crime history, is exemplified in the collection by his early gem, “The Ghost of Sergeant Davies.” Set in desolate stretches of the Highlands after the Jacobite Rising of 1745, the murder of Davies was followed by a farcical trial in which hearsay testimony of the victim’s ghost was admitted. Roughead notes that the Scots apparition spoke in Gaelic, “which would seem to be an appropriate medium of communication but for the fact that the soldier [Davies], an Englishman, while in the flesh had no knowledge of that tongue.”
In a sensational French trial of 1956, Denise Labbé and her lover, Jacques Algarron, were sentenced to long prison terms after Denise drowned her little daughter Catherine in a vessel for washing clothes. In Rayner Heppenstall’s brief commentary, “Devils in the Flesh,” Satan’s