Read Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of Online
Authors: Harold Schechter
Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (52 page)
On Monday night, July 30, after a dinner at the McKechnie home, Bobby and Freda went out for a drive. Though the sun had set and a hard rain was falling, Freda—giddy with excitement over the impending nuptials—proposed that they go for a swim at Harvey’s Lake. They arrived there shortly after nine o’clock. Parking at a spot called Sandy Beach, they changed into swimsuits and waded into the rain-pelted water.
When, about an hour later, the car drove away from the beach, Bobby was alone inside.
E
ARLY THE FOLLOWING
morning, a local teenager, Irene Cohen, was strolling along the beach when she spotted a white rubber bathing cap bobbing at the shoreline. Looking up, she was startled to see a woman’s body in an orange swimsuit floating facedown in the lake. Terrified, she alerted a lifeguard named George Jones, who ran into the water and pulled the lifeless body onto the sand.
Police were summoned, along with a local physician, Dr. H. H. Brown, who quickly determined that the woman had died not of drowning but from a savage blow to the back of her head with a blunt instrument. The murder weapon itself turned up shortly afterward when investigators, scouring the crime scene, came upon a leather-covered blackjack on the beach. By then, the victim had been identified as Freda McKechnie, whose parents had spent a sleepless night wondering why their daughter had never returned home from her drive with Bobby Edwards.
Within hours, Edwards was under arrest for suspicion of murder. At first he denied that he and Freda had been to the lake at all. After cruising around for a while—so he claimed—he had dropped Freda off in town, then gone to meet some friends whose names he could not remember. When his interrogators revealed that tire tracks found at the crime scene matched the tires on his car, he sheepishly admitted that he had been lying and offered to tell “what really happened.”
He and Freda had, in fact, driven out to Sandy Beach and—despite the darkness, rain, and occasional flashes of lightning—had decided to go for a swim. After changing
in the car, they “went into the water and waded to the float. I got a notion to dive. I dove. When I came up, my hand struck her under the chin. She fell backward and hit her head against the float.” Stunned but still conscious, she had swum farther out into the water. A moment later, according to this wildly implausible account, Robert saw “her white bathing cap disappear. I went out for her but couldn’t find her. I went back and got in my car and drove away.”
On the morning after his arrest, following a visit to the crime scene, Bobby revised his story again. He admitted that he had struck Freda with the blackjack. He insisted, however, that she was already dead when he hit her.
According to this version, he and Freda had taken a rowboat out to the float. After swimming for a while, Freda had been overcome by the cold. As she stepped back into the rowboat to return to the shore, she suddenly collapsed. Bobby tried to revive her but was unable to detect a pulse or a heartbeat. Panicking, he swam back to shore and ran to his car. As he slid behind the wheel, he thought of the blackjack he carried in the glove compartment for self-protection.
“It occurred to me,” he said, “that if there was some mark on Freda’s body, it might make her death look like an accident and I would be left out of it. I knew Freda was pregnant. I knew she was not allowed to swim. When I returned to the boat, she was in the same position. She had not revived. I could do nothing. I put her head over my left arm and struck her on the back of the head with the blackjack. I didn’t even realize what I had done, and I carried the body out to the water up to my chest and let it drop.”
By this time, investigators knew that Bobby was in love with another woman and had a compelling motive to do away with Freda. When they confronted him with all the circumstantial evidence against him, he finally broke down. “I’ve prayed and read my Testament and my parents tell me to tell the truth. Here it is,” he said. “Freda didn’t faint, she didn’t fall and hurt herself. I had been thinking of doing this ever since she told me she was to become a mother—because I wanted to marry Margaret Crain.
“We swam for a while,” he continued. “We talked about her having a baby. The water was a little over four feet deep, and when she ducked down once, she came up with her back to me. I pulled out the blackjack quick and hit her on the back of the head. I hit her with the blackjack and then I left her in the water.”
After tossing the murder weapon into the lake, Bobby had dressed and driven
home, stopping along the way to buy a few chocolate bars for his mother at an all-night drugstore. Before going to bed, he had hung his swimsuit on the backyard line to dry. He slept perfectly soundly that night and went off to work the next morning as if nothing had happened.
N
O ONE KNOWS
who first dubbed the case the “American Tragedy” murder. Ace newsmen from two Philadelphia papers, the Record and the Bulletin, both claimed to have invented the catchphrase, as did a writer for the United Press syndicate and a reporter for the
New York Times
. Very possibly all four thought of it at once, since the details of the tragedy were so strikingly similar to the plot of Theodore Dreiser’s bestseller. Within days of Bobby Edwards’ arrest, newspapers across the country were running front-page stories suggesting that the novel—or (as seemed more likely to many observers) the hit movie based on it—had provided the confessed killer with the blueprint for his crime.
As is the case with virtually every other work of literature or mass entertainment that has been blamed for inciting a murder, there turned out to be no truth to this accusation. By all accounts, Bobby Edwards had never read the book nor seen its cinematic adaptation. Still, the startling resemblance between the murder of Freda McKechnie and Dreiser’s fictionalized version of the Chester Gillette–Grace Brown case turned the story into a nationwide sensation.
Dreiser himself saw the Edwards case as “an exact duplicate of the story which I had written” and wondered whether “my book had produced the crime.” When the
New York Post
commissioned him to travel to Pennsylvania and cover the trial, he leapt at the chance. On opening day, October 1, 1934, the famed author was one of more than fifty reporters from all over the country who had flocked to the Luzerne County Courthouse in Wilkes-Barre. The scene, as he wrote, was “quite a spectacle”:
Two rooms ordinarily used for other purposes on the third floor had been closely packed with telegraph equipment and special wires. Newspapermen and women were thick as flies at the press table reserved for them. There was a shock brigade of photographers with cameras and flashlights. Over the courthouse and spinning around like wasps were moving picture and newspaper planes, with their cameras and observing photographers
and reporters. Actually, the streets, the grounds, the courthouse halls, had somewhat the atmosphere of a gala event, like the entrance to a popular county fair or football game—even a Mexican bullfight.
The hundreds of sensation seekers who crammed into the courtroom hoping for a titillating show were not disappointed. The prurient high point came when the district attorney read a series of Bobby Edwards’ steamy love letters to Freda McKechnie—writings so salacious that, according to one observer, they made John Cleland’s pornographic classic The Memoirs of Fanny Hill “look like a toned-down version of Little Women.”
By then, Bobby Edwards—“the Playboy of the anthracite fields,” as the papers now dubbed him—had recanted his confession and reverted to his claim that Freda died accidentally. His testimony failed to persuade the jury, which took less than twelve hours to convict him and sentence him to death. Still convinced that Bobby, like his predecessor Chester Gillette, was a victim of American social pressures, Theodore Dreiser wrote to the governor of Pennsylvania in an attempt to win a pardon for the condemned young man. His effort was in vain. Just after midnight on May 6, 1935—after spending his final hours reading the family Bible—Bobby Edwards, dressed in white shirt, black trousers, and black slippers, walked calmly to the electric chair at Rockview Penitentiary in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. “He was murmuring a prayer,” wrote one reporter, “as the black hood fell over his head.”
Reporting on the Edwards case for Murder Mystery magazine, Theodore Dreiser explained that as far back as 1892, during his days as a novice newspaperman in Chicago, he had “observed a certain type of crime in the United States”—one that “seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrowing ambition to be somebody financially and socially.” This distinctively American brand of crime, explained Dreiser, involved “the young ambitious lover of some poorer girl who had been attractive enough to satisfy him” until “a more attractive girl with money or position appeared and he quickly discovered that he could no longer care for his first love. What produced this particular type of crime was the fact that it was not always possible to drop this first girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy.”
To support his claim, Dreiser pointed to a half dozen such murders, including the 1894 case of Carlyle Harris, a young New York City medical student who “seduced a young girl poorer than he was,” only to dispatch her with poison when he fell in love with “an attractive girl of much higher station than his own” (see
this page
); a 1900 case in Charleston, South Carolina, “wherein a girl was shot by her lover because he wanted to better his social position by marrying a Charleston society girl”; and, of course, the Gillette-Brown case of 1905, which served as the basis for An American Tragedy. Indeed, so common were such cases that, according to Dreiser, between 1895 and 1935 “there has scarcely been a year in which some part of the country has not been presented with a case of this type.”
That murders of this kind continue to occur all too frequently in the United States is made alarmingly clear by Marilee Strong in her powerful 2008 book, Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives. An award-winning journalist who became obsessed with the 2002 case of Scott Peterson—the clean-cut, smooth-talking young fertilizer salesman who murdered his eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci, so that he could pursue his hedonistic life as a swinging single—Strong began investigating other, similar cases, dating back to the early twentieth century. Analyzing fifty such murders in her book, she presents a profile of a previously unrecognized type of criminal she labels the “eraser killer”: the seemingly normal man and solid citizen who decides that he wants to rid himself of an “inconvenient” wife or girlfriend and coolly sets out to do away with her rather than put himself through the hassle of a breakup or divorce.
Strong is (justifiably) far less sympathetic to such men than Dreiser, who blamed their crimes on American society and its “craze for social and money success.” In Strong’s view, the “eraser killer” is not the pitiable victim of America’s misguided values but a cold-blooded psychopath, motivated solely by a malign sense of “narcissistic entitlement”—a soulless being who cares about nothing but the gratification of his own desires.
[
Sources: The most complete account of the Edwards-McKechnie case is Theodore Dreiser’s “I Find the Real American Tragedy,” a greatly expanded version of his New York Post dispatches that was published as a five-part series in the February-June 1935 issues of Mystery Magazine. Columnist and future TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen also wrote a fine piece on the murder, “Sex and the All-American Boy,” reprinted in my book True Crime: An American Anthology (New York: Library of America, 2008).
]
“THE MAD SCULPTOR”
T
HOUGH REMEMBERED TODAY AS A MORAL CRUSADER WHOSE
1954 screed
The Seduction of the Innocent
called for the censorship of comic books, Fredric Wertham was no self-righteous bluenose but one of New York City’s most enlightened and respected psychiatrists. German-born and educated in London, Munich, Paris, and Vienna (where he had a brief but memorable encounter with Freud), he immigrated to the United States in 1922, joining the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Ten years later he took up permanent residency in Manhattan, where—along with a myriad of other activities—he served as senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic. It was in that capacity that he first encountered Robert Irwin.
Shortly before 2:30 a.m. on October 27, 1932, the twenty-nine-year-old Irwin—a “nice, well-spoken, frank-looking young man”—showed up at Bellevue’s emergency room with his penis badly mutilated and a rubber band tightly wound around its base. Calmly explaining that he had tried to castrate himself with a razor, Irwin urged the intern to finish the job. Ignoring the demented plea, the young physician stitched the partly severed member back together and sent Irwin to the psychiatric clinic, where, on the following morning, he was first seen by Dr. Wertham.
Visiting Irwin on a nearly daily basis, Wertham soon garnered the central facts of
his life. Like a surprising number of American psychopaths, he was raised by a fanatically devout mother, who christened him Fenelon Arroyo Seco Irwin—names, according to Irwin, with “special religious associations” (“Fenelon,” for example, apparently referred to the seventeenth-century French theologian François Fénelon). His earliest memories, as Wertham later recorded, were of being dragged to frenzied tent meetings where “members of the church would speak in tongues which they had not heard before” and be “cured of all sorts of ailments by hysterical prayer.”
