Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (8 page)

G
IVEN OUR NOTORIOUSLY SHORT HISTORICAL MEMORY, IT’S NO SURPRISE
that we Americans have completely forgotten Polly Bodine. In her own time, however, she was a figure of nationwide notoriety—the Lizzie Borden of her day. Like Lizzie, she was accused of hacking two family members to death. Like Lizzie, she was ultimately exonerated. Despite the judgment of the courts, however, most people, then and afterward, firmly believed that she was guilty. Indeed, there seems little doubt that Polly Bodine, like her 1890s counterpart, got away with double murder.

For all their similarities, however, there were significant differences between the two women. At the time of the Fall River horror, its alleged perpetrator was a prim and proper spinster. Polly
Bodine was a different breed of woman. Born in 1809 on Staten Island—then “a rural seafaring community of 10,000 people living in hamlets”—she was married at fifteen to an oysterman named Andrew Bodine and bore him a daughter and son in rapid succession. Five years after the wedding, owing to some unspecified “misconduct on the part of the wife,” the couple separated and the children were taken into the home of their maternal grandparents.

Soon afterward, Polly ran off to Washington, D.C., with a Frenchman and reportedly gave birth to another baby, who was evidently abandoned by the wayward young mother. Following the sudden death of her foreign-born paramour, she adopted the name Mary Ann Houston and took up with a series of men before becoming the mistress of a married Buffalo merchant. She was eventually abandoned by her lover, though not before wrecking his marriage.

She next showed up in New York City, where, rumor had it, she ran a high-class bordello. Sometime in 1835, she took up with an apothecary named George Waite, proprietor of a drugstore on Canal Street. During the course of their eight-year affair she underwent eight pregnancies. Seven were terminated by abortions performed by Waite himself.

In the meantime, Polly’s husband, Andrew—to whom she was still legally wed—had descended into a life of drunken debauchery, supposedly as a result of his wife’s flagrant infidelities. Sometime around 1841, without bothering with the formality of a divorce, he married “a disreputable character by the name of Simpson.” Two years later, the second Mrs. Bodine was found dead in bed, and Andrew was arrested for her murder. He was acquitted for lack of evidence but promptly indicted for bigamy, found guilty, and sentenced to two years in Sing Sing. By the time he emerged, his first wife, Polly, had become the central figure in the country’s most sensational crime.

S
ITUATED ON THE
North Shore of Staten Island, Granite Village (later rechristened Graniteville) derived its name from the extensive rock quarry that operated nearby. In 1843, the entire community consisted of “one church, a tavern, several stores of various kinds, and about forty or fifty private dwellings.” One of the latter was home to Polly Bodine’s parents, Abraham and Mary Houseman. Another—“a pretty cottage scarcely more than a stone’s throw away”—belonged to her brother, George.

A “big, bluff, good-natured” schooner captain, George had a pretty young wife, the former Emeline Van Pelt, who had borne him a daughter within a year of their marriage. Partly because Emeline’s health had been fragile since the baby’s arrival—and partly because he distrusted banks and kept all his savings in his house—George was reluctant to leave his wife alone when he was away at sea. To keep her company during his absences, he often relied on his sister Polly. During the winter months, the three females—Polly, Emeline, and baby Eliza—slept in a corner of the kitchen near the stove.

On the afternoon of Sunday, December 24, 1843—while George was heading home from a month-long voyage to Virginia—a young neighbor of the Houseman’s, fourteen-year-old Matilda O’Rourke, paid a Christmas Eve visit to Emeline. She had been there only a short time when Polly arrived to spend the night with her sister-in-law. Before Matilda left—as she would later testify—she saw Emeline place her silver teaspoons, dessert spoons, and sugar tongs in a cabinet and “twice take her gold watch out of a drawer to learn the time.” Matilda also observed that the baby, then twenty months old, “had on the string of coral beads and gold locket which it usually wore upon its neck.”

A
T AROUND SIX
o’clock the next morning, Christmas Day, Polly returned to her parents’ home from her overnight stay with Emeline. Though her voluminous clothes kept her condition concealed from the world, she was eight months pregnant at the time and possessed of a ravenous appetite.

She devoured a substantial breakfast. Then—telling her mother that she was off to spend the holiday with George Waite at his apothecary shop in lower Manhattan—she put on her cloak and bonnet, loaded a large wicker basket with some pies, and headed outside again.

As she emerged from the house, she spotted a neighbor boy named John Thompson pounding on the kitchen door of Emeline’s house. “If you knock much harder, you’ll knock that door down,” Polly called to him. The boy explained that he had been sent by his ailing grandmother to borrow some liver pills from Emeline. Polly told him that Emeline had gone to spend Christmas with her parents, the Van Pelts, and would not be home all day. As John turned to leave, he saw Polly walk to the corner and board the stagecoach to the ferry.

A
FEW HOURS
later, at roughly 9:00 a.m., the ferry docked in Manhattan, where Polly was met by her sixteen-year-old son, Albert, who worked as a live-in apprentice at George Waite’s pharmacy. Albert took the wicker basket from his mother and the two proceeded toward the store. On their way, they stopped at a milliner’s, where, for 50¢, Polly purchased a hood and a green veil.

When they arrived at Waite’s place on Canal Street, Albert immediately went to the basement to finish stacking some boxes, leaving Polly and her lover alone in the store. A while later, the boy came back upstairs and found the two adults deep in conversation. Handing Albert some money, Waite told him to go out and buy a leg of mutton for Christmas dinner. Albert expressed surprise. Waite—as the boy later testified—“had never spoke of getting a leg of mutton before.” Besides, “there was a-plenty in the house to eat.” And in any case, the market was bound to be “closed up for the holiday.”

Waite, however, was insistent. If the local market was closed, there was another one about three-quarters of a mile away. And if that was closed, too, Albert could always try the meat stands on Washington and Greenwich streets.

It took Albert about an hour and a half to complete the errand. When he returned with the mutton at 2:30 p.m., his mother wasn’t there. When Albert asked about her, Waite only said she “was gone out, but he did not know where.”

A
T AROUND
1:30 p.m., while Albert was off in search of the mutton, a woman dressed in a cloak and veiled hood entered the pawnshop of Aaron Adolphus at 332 William Street, where she accepted an offer of $35 for a gold watch engraved with the initials “EH.” At another shop on East Broadway, she pawned the gold chain belonging to the watch for $25. She then made her way to two more pawnbrokers, both on Chatham Street, where she pawned a set of silver teaspoons, dessert spoons, and sugar tongs, all engraved with the initials “EH.” Her final stop was the jewelry store of Thomson & Fisher at 331 Broadway, where she traded a child’s necklace—a little gold locket attached to a string of coral beads—for a woven hair bracelet and 50¢ in coin.

Not long after Albert returned from his errand, his mother reappeared at the store with her wicker basket looped over one arm. Inside were some additional
holiday treats: a New Year’s cake and some donuts for her son. Oddly, given all the food that she and Waite had brought in, she did not stay for dinner. She left at around 3:30 p.m., telling her son that she planned to spend the night at the nearby home of a friend, a Mrs. Strong.

Albert, as he later testified, “did not see her again that day.”

B
ACK ON
S
TATEN
Island, the trim little cottage of Captain George Houseman stood quiet all day. Sometime toward dusk, a neighbor named Richardson, who lived about a half mile away, was riding his horse past the shuttered house when he spotted a woman standing in the front yard. As he rode past, she turned and entered the front door. Richardson didn’t recognize the woman, whose face was obscured by a hood and green veil. He was certain, however, that she was not Emeline Houseman.

A
FEW HOURS
later, at around 9:30 p.m., two boys returning from a skating party saw smoke billowing from George Housman’s residence. Their shouts brought the neighbors running. Armed with water pails, several of the men broke in through the back door and quickly extinguished the fire, which was confined to the northwest corner of the kitchen, near the stove.

No one appeared to be home. Abraham and Mary Houseman, who had been first on the scene, explained to the others that, according to their daughter Polly, Emeline had taken the baby to her parents’ home for Christmas—a fortunate circumstance, since her bed, set up close to the stove, had been incinerated by the flames.

Lifting up the smoldering mass of feathers and straw, one of the rescuers, Andrew Miller, discovered a charred object with a vaguely human shape. His first thought was that it was a ship’s wooden figurehead, perhaps belonging to Captain George’s schooner. Only when he peered more closely did he realize, to his horror, that it was the body of Emeline Houseman.

Throwing a blanket over the corpse, Miller grabbed it under the arms while another man, Daniel Cocheron, took hold of the legs. As they carried the body outside, Emeline’s roasted right arm became detached from the shoulder and fell to the ground.

Setting the remains on the stone walkway, the men returned to the kitchen, where they found what was left of the baby. Wrapping it in a calico spread, Miller carried it outside and laid it beside its mother.

A postmortem conducted later that day by Dr. William G. Eadie revealed that both mother and child had been slaughtered hours before the fire was set. Emeline’s throat had been gashed and her skull broken open so savagely that the exposed remnants of her brain had been baked in the fire. An axe blow to her left forearm had shattered the bones, whose blackened ends protruded from the roasted flesh. Most of the baby’s skull was missing—fragments would later be found in the wreckage—as was its right leg, burned off below the knee. Both victims, in the words of one contemporary chronicler, “could scarcely be said to bear any resemblance to the human species.” Indeed, positive identification of Emeline was possible only because of “the peculiarity of her teeth.”

Robbery appeared to be the primary motive for the atrocity. Family members inspecting the house determined that it had been ransacked of its valuables, including Emeline’s engraved silver spoons, sugar tongs, and gold watch. Missing, too, were a pair of household items that—despite an extensive search of the premises—would never be found: a hatchet and a carving knife.

A
T APPROXIMATELY
7:30 a.m. on December 26, the morning after the fire, a witness saw Polly Bodine trudging toward the ferry landing in Tompkinsville, having evidently made the six-mile trip from Granite Village on foot. He recognized her, so he later testified, by her most distinctive feature, the “long, hooked nose” that would help inspire her future nickname: “The Witch of Staten Island.”

Boarding the little steam vessel, she sank into a chair in a darkened corner of the cabin and summoned the ship’s chambermaid, Catherine Jane Hawkins. Explaining that she was “fatigued from having walked a long way,” she asked if there was any food and gin aboard. Marveling that anyone, let alone a woman, would crave a drink of gin at that hour of the day, Catherine nevertheless hustled off, returning a few minutes later with a big slice of pie and a glass of the liquor, which Polly lost no time in consuming.