A Criminal History of Mankind (81 page)

But there was no concrete evidence against Tessnow. At this point, the prosecutor heard that a young doctor named Paul Uhlenhuth, of the University of Griefswald, had discovered a test that would not only distinguish blood from other substances, but could actually distinguish the type of blood; the test depended on the defensive properties that are developed by blood when it is injected with foreign protein. Tessnow’s clothes were sent to Uhlenhuth, who cut out various stains and dissolved them in salt water. His test showed conclusively that the stains on the clothes were not wood-stain; they were of blood - both human and sheep’s. This evidence was conclusive. Tessnow was executed.

The most striking thing about the cases mentioned above is their sadistic violence. It seems odd that so many of the major sex crimes in the latter half of the nineteenth century should involve this frenzy. The answer undoubtedly lies in the social attitudes of the period. At most levels of society, relations between men and women were stiff and formal. So when sheer sexual lust overcame these inhibitions, the result was a violent explosion that went beyond mere rape.

Of course, there
were
a large number of ordinary rapes, and no doubt it would be possible to disinter these from the police court records of the time. But they were not recorded by writers of crime (such as Major Arthur Griffiths, whose
Mysteries of the Police and Crime
is still the best general introduction to nineteenth ceatury villainy.) Thomas S. Duke’s
Celebrated Criminal Cases of America
is the American equivalent of the
Newgate Calendar
, and was published as late as 1910; yet among its hundred or so cases, there are only three sex crimes. In all three, we observe this same ‘explosive’ element. One is the case of Jesse Pomeroy, already described. Another concerned a ‘degenerate’ named Hadley, who lured a fifteen-year-old girl to a rented house, claiming he needed a baby sitter; she was raped and ‘frightfully mutilated’. The crime was obviously carefully planned - the house had been specially rented - and Hadley was never caught.

The third case is in some ways the most typical. In 1895, twenty-four-year-old Theodore Durrant was a Sunday school superintendent and a prominent member of the Emanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco. He was also in his final year at the Cooper Medical College. He was deeply interested in pretty, twenty-one-year-old Blanche Lamont, a highly religious girl who ‘seldom went to places of amusement’. On 3 April 1895, Miss Lamont left her cookery class and accompanied Durrant to the Emanuel Baptist Church on Bartlett Street. He had the church keys. There he strangled her, and dragged her body up to the belfry, where he stripped and, presumably, raped her. (When the body was later examined, decomposition made it impossible to be specific about this.) He placed two small wooden blocks under her head as a pillow, crossed her hands on her breasts, and left her. He had been alone in the church with her for more than an hour. Downstairs he encountered the church organist, nineteen-year-old George King, a close friend. King observed that Durrant looked pale and shaken. Durrant explained that he had been searching for a gas leak, and had been almost overpowered by escaping gas. King sympathetically went off to buy a bottle of bromo-seltzer; but the story of the gas leak puzzled him, for he could smell no gas, and he knew that plumbers had checked all the fittings recently.

Blanche’s disappearance caused wide excitement; but no one suspected Durrant, whose piety seemed to place him above reproach. Durrant confided to Blanche’s aunt and uncle - with whom she lived - that he suspected she had allowed herself to be lured to a ‘house of ill-repute’; he even made sure he was seen travelling to outlying areas, searching for her.

One week after the murder of Blanche Lamont, Durrant persuaded twenty-year-old Minnie Williams - another regular churchgoer - to accompany him into the church library. What happened next can be tentatively reconstructed from medical evidence. Durrant went out of the room, and reappeared naked. Then he grabbed Minnie, pulled her skirt over her head, and rammed the cloth into her mouth to choke her screams. He raped her, then took a knife and slashed and stabbed her so violently that blood spurted over the walls. When the blade broke off in her breast, he raped her again. Then he went to a meeting of young church members - which Minnie had been due to attend - arriving two hours late. At midnight, after the meeting, he went back to the church again; what he did there will never be known.

Early next morning, Durrant left San Francisco to do some training with the state militia. Women who went to decorate the church for Easter Sunday found Minnie’s mutilated body in the library; the dress had been rammed down the throat so violently that the medical examiner had difficulty in pulling it out. Police searched the rest of the building and found Blanche Lamont’s body, looking ‘white as marble’; but downstairs in the church, it quickly turned black and began to decompose, so the doctor was unable to say whether - or how often - she had been raped.

Durrant was arrested. His friends and colleagues were simply unable to believe that he could be the murderer; they insisted that he was a ‘good man’. But a reporter discovered that another young lady, a Miss Annie Welming, had narrowly escaped becoming a rape victim. She had gone into the church library with Durrant, who had left her alone. Then he walked in, naked, and the girl had screamed and fled.

Many witnesses had seen both girls with Durrant just before they disappeared. His appeals lasted for three years, but he was eventually hanged in 1898. The case caused a sensation all over America, and was reported in European newspapers (an indication that sex crime was still a rarity).

Durrant’s case provides us with a great deal of insight into ‘Victorian’ sex crime. There is no reason to suppose that his supporters, who regarded him as a ‘good man’, were mistaken. All the indications suggest that he was genuinely religious. One close friend - and fellow student - testified that Durrant had certainly been ‘pure’ up until two years before, since they had discussed the matter at length. The story of Annie Welming suggests that he was an exhibitionist with a compulsive desire to appear naked in front of women. (Miss Welming told a friend about her experience, and there was some gossip; however, Durrant’s reputation stood so high that it soon died away.)

This in turn suggests that he knew precisely what he intended to do on the day he took Blanche to the church. He had even established an alibi, asking a friend to answer his name in the roll-call at the medical school. Blanche and he had been ‘keeping company’ for some time; at one point, she had refused to speak to him for several weeks after he made some kind of advance. The evidence suggests that he wanted her badly. She was prim and respectable and would allow no ‘liberties’. On 3 April 1895, he decided that the pleasure of throwing off all his sexual inhibitions and frustrations was worth the risk. When he walked in naked, she probably screamed; he throttled and raped her. Then he carried the body up to the belfry and undressed it. He spent a considerable time - at least half an hour - alone with the body. He may have hinted to Minnie Williams that he had killed Blanche - a witness testified that Minnie had said ‘she knew too much’ about Blanche’s disappearance. It is even possible that Durrant lured Minnie to the church to silence her. If so, the temptation of being alone in the church with a pretty girl was too great. The clothes Durrant was seen wearing on the day of Minnie’s disappearance had no bloodstains, which suggests not only that he took them off before stabbing her, but that he took them off in another room, since her blood spurted so far. Marks on Minnie’s neck showed that she had been throttled unconscious before the dress was thrust down her throat; at this point, she must still have been alive. After raping her, Durrant was still in such a frenzy that he slashed and stabbed her until the knife broke off in her breast. The medical examiner testified that there was evidence that Durrant then raped her again - although this could have happened when he returned at midnight.

The Durrant case, then, is a textbook Victorian sex crime, and it makes us aware of the inhibitions and frustrations that caused the element of explosive violence in so many cases of the period. Most young men - and women - are biologically prepared for sexual intercourse from the age of thirteen or so, and experience sexual curiosity many years earlier than that. In an age when even a glimpse of a woman’s ankle was regarded as sexually provocative, the frustration of young men must have been enormous. In
My Life and Loves
, Frank Harris describes how, as a child, he used to allow the pencil to roll under the table so that he could crawl on all fours and look at the girls’ legs. But when he mentions seeing ‘the legs up to the knees’, we realise that they wore long skirts; it was their ankles and calves that caused Harris so much excitement.

It is clear, therefore, why sex crime suddenly made its appearance in the second half of the nineteenth century: it was due to a combination of imagination - fed by the new habit of novel-reading - and of frustration due to Victorian prudery. Suddenly, sex was no longer the down-to-earth occupation it had been for Cleland and Boswell; it had become something to brood about and gloat about. Baudelaire remarked that unless sex was sinful, then it was boring and meaningless; what he meant was that, in the crucible of the imagination, sex could be turned into something that was at once wicked and delicious. In the works of the new ‘sexologists’ such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, we read of various kinds of fetishism - of men who were sexually excited by women’s shoes, stays, knickers, aprons, even crutches. The sheer pressure of desire had imbued these objects with sexual ‘magic’. Havelock Ellis himself had once seen his mother urinating in Regent’s Park, and for the rest of his life, wrote poetically about ‘golden streams’ and persuaded his mistresses to urinate in front of him.

All this explains why, although Victorian prudery was fast disappearing by the year 1901 (when Queen Victoria died), the problem of sex crime showed no sign of going away. It is true that the old, morbid sense of ‘forbiddenness’ gradually leaked away as sex became a subject that could be discussed openly, and that one result was that violent sex crimes - like those of the Ripper and Vacher - became increasingly rare. But there could be no return to the realistic sexual attitudes of Defoe and Cleland. For better or worse, sex had been taken over by the human imagination.

This meant, of course, that sex had become slightly unreal. Shakespeare idealised Juliet; but he knew precisely what she was like as a human being. The heroines of Dickens and Thackeray and Wilkie Collins lack a whole dimension of reality. ‘Professor’ Joad once remarked that he became interested in women when he discovered they were not solid below the waist. The Victorian novelists give the impression that their heroines are solid from the waist down (no wonder ‘Walter’ found it impossible to imagine them having female organs like his cousins). So the new sexual frankness - and the alarming theories of Professor Freud - made no real impact on the romanticism of the Edwardians. They continued to be avidly interested in seduction and adultery, even when they were convinced they were being shocked.

Newspaper proprietors - like William Randolph Hearst - soon made the discovery that sex sells newspapers; so the public had to be told the details of every divorce scandal. Murder cases involving adultery received headline treatment for as long as the case lasted. In America in 1904, the sensation of the year was the trial of
Floradora
girl Nan Patterson for shooting her lover in a hansom cab when he announced he was leaving her (she claimed it was suicide). In 1906, journalists labelled the murder of architect Stanford White ‘the crime of the century’; White was shot by a rich playboy named Harry Thaw, who had discovered that his wife - another
Floradora
girl - had been White’s mistress. Both were utterly commonplace crimes of passion; but they had the necessary element of adultery and glamour.

Even glamour was not essential; it was the sex that mattered. The sensation of 1908 was the case of the sinister Belle Gunness of Indiana, who advertised for husbands and then murdered them. 1910 was a good year. In London, Dr Crippen was tried for the murder of his wife (yet another ex-showgirl); he dismembered her and eloped with his mistress, who was disguised as a boy. In Venice, there was the trial of Countess Marie Tarnowska, who had persuaded one lover to murder another in order to collect his insurance money and run away with a third. We would now describe her as a scheming nymphomaniac; but a contemporary book about her calls her ‘the strange Russian woman whose hand slew no man, but whose beauty drove those who loved her to commit murder for her sake.’ (Even Belle Gunness, who weighed twenty stone and whose features were distinctly porcine is depicted in contemporary sketches as slim and beautiful.)

But a case of 1913 revealed that a genuine sex crime could eclipse all other scandals. On a Saturday morning in April, fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan went to collect her wages from a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia; on her way out, she called at the ladies’ toilet in the basement, where a negro named Jim Conley was sleeping off a hangover. The next day, her body was found in the basement, her dress around her waist, and a cord knotted round her throat so tightly that it disappeared into the flesh. She also had teeth marks on her bare shoulder. Two notes lay by the body, stating that she had been attacked by ‘a tall, sleam negro’ - an obvious attempt to throw suspicion on the night-watchman who found the body. (Conley was short and squat.)

The manager of the pencil factory, a Jew named Leo Frank, was arrested. Conley at first escaped suspicion by asserting that he could not read or write; later, when it was proved that he could do both, he insisted that Leo Frank had made him write the notes on the day before the murder. Oddly enough, the citizens of Atlanta preferred to believe that a Jew was guilty; public indignation would not be satisfied with the mere hanging of a negro. Negros were lynched every day on the slightest pretext - in the week after Mary Phagan’s murder, one was lynched for firing off a gun when drunk, one for speaking disrespectfully to a white man, and one for ogling Sunday-school mistresses at a picnic. In 1906, an unfounded rumour that blacks had killed two white women led to some of the worst race riots in American history, and many black men, women and children were killed by a rampaging white mob. If one white life was worth a dozen blacks, then obviously there was no mathematical logic in arresting a black for Mary Phagan’s murder; a Jew made an altogether more satisfactory culprit.