Prologue
On a sultry summer evening in 1875, the naturalist, inventor, and statesman Winston Albert Chase gave a lecture at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His talk was titled “The American Criminal: A Study in Three Parts,” wherein he put forth a theory that there are three types of people who engage in criminal acts. He presented, as evidence, a melding of ideas from Enlightenment-era French philosophy, modern psychiatry, and phrenology. There were also his own observations of human nature collected from his hometown of Washington, D.C., where, he joked, he had no shortage of criminals to observe. After the laughter from this remark died down, Chase told the audience of four hundred, all in formal attire, that he had brought with him for exhibition real-life criminals, one from each of the three classes he meant to expound upon. It was his intention to reveal them in turn and make an examination of their crimes and countenance. This would lead him to a conclusion not just about the three individual criminals present, but, in his own words, “about the nature of crime itself, its relation to greed, desire, our very way of living . . . and maybe even a little something about you yourselves, dear ladies and gentlemen.”
This drew applause. Chase was a gifted orator. His audience expected, for the price of their tickets, to be entertained as well as educated. And on the night of his talk in Philadelphia, he did not disappoint.
Chase presented the first of his criminal specimens in a steel cage three feet in length on each side, wheeled onstage by two burly assistants. The criminal himself was a large man, exactly the sort the audience might be expecting. His dark hair was shaved almost to his white scalp. His eyebrows were close and thick. He had prominent scars on his chin and upper lip.
He was perched on a wooden chair inside his enclosure. At first, he just sat, looking out at the audience, who murmured among themselves, confirming all their own suspicions. Then, as Chase approached with his calipers and measuring tape, the large man leapt forward, seizing the cage bars with both hands. “Fuck you all, you rich bitches and cunts!” he shouted. The audience gasped and a few members even screamed, but Chase simply raised his hand. When he had silence again, he turned to the large man and gestured for him to take his seat, which he did. Chase then explained that this kind of criminal was moved almost as if by forces outside himself to commit sin. Murder, rape, vandalism, assault—none of these acts were beyond him. It was not that he had no understanding of right and wrong, but that, to him, right and wrong were irrelevant. They did not govern him. Only his basest impulses did.
“But he did not start out this way. He wasn’t born full of evil. Though you would surely cross the street if you saw him tonight in your path, there was once a time when he would barely have caught your notice. This criminal starts small, with illicit acts that annoy rather than frighten, until he becomes seduced by the possibilities born of taking power into his own hands. He doesn’t want to amass money and pleasure so much as he wants to see these commodities handed over. Unsettling? Yes. But wait until you meet the sorts for whom their criminality is inherent, etched into the very fiber of their being.”
The large man was wheeled off and a second cage was brought forward, this one containing a youth in a school uniform. Once his cage was situated, the youngster stood, doffed his cap, and bowed. Again, the audience murmured, this time in surprise. What crimes could this dapper young man be capable of? Chase introduced the boy as “My nephew, recently graduated from Andover, with honors.” Then there were chuckles as the men and women thought of their own Andover nephews and sons. Wouldn’t they like to put those charming boys in a cage every once in a while?
“This little fellow,” Chase explained, “is a liar and a thief. He fibs both when it is convenient to him, but also for the sake of the fib itself—the sheer fun of it. Using his wit and his smile, he deceives family, friends, teachers, and even young lovers for his own gain. He also takes money from any pocketbook or wallet handy, including that of his dear, generous uncle.
“This sort of criminal is acutely aware that what he does is wrong, but he is able to justify his ill deeds through the belief that the benefit to himself personally outweighs the deficit to his victims. There is a cunning to his ways, but also a cowardice, for he cannot rise above his own petty wants to think of his fellow man. His kind is quite loathsome, I think we will all agree. But of the three, he is the least dangerous to society at large.”
Chase placed his index finger on his nephew’s forehead and drew an imaginary line to the temple. “You can see the path of deceit here. Watch for it in other bright boys,” he warned. “You will find they grow into men of success in many fields, finance in particular. Though I would advise you against engaging in business with him. His associates are likely to all end up in jail eventually, having taken the fall for his misdeeds.”
Chase had saved his most shocking exhibit for last, of course. The third cage, wheeled onstage as the audience murmured in confusion, contained a woman, small and frail, seated in a rocking chair. The chair wobbled violently from the cage movers’ efforts, and the old woman had to clutch its arms so as not to be pitched onto the floor. But once the moving was done and the rocking became more gentle, she picked up a ball of yarn and needles from her lap and began to knit, paying no attention to the audience whatsoever.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the third criminal of the evening, my mother.”
The gasps were resounding.
Chase went on to enumerate the woman’s offenses. “My dearest mother is not the gentle matron she appears,” he began. “She is, in fact, a person of great abilities, if you follow my meaning. In previous, more ignorant eras, she might have been labeled a witch. But we of the modern day know such beings do not exist. Instead, there is among us a certain kind of woman who can so subtly bend her cruelty as to seem almost magical. She can use her words to change the will of those around her so they do her bidding. This is a criminal who traffics in crimes of the psyche and the emotions.”
He explained the many, many ways his mother had manipulated him and his siblings, ensnaring them to undertake acts they never would, in their right minds, have done on their own. Some such acts were benign (studying piano instead of violin), others bafflingly malicious (pushing a prep school rival down a flight of stairs).
“I did these things,” Chase said. “But not because I wished them. She planted them in me. I must posit here that this sort of criminal is the most terrifying, not for the atrocities she commits, but for the mindset with which she undertakes them. This is a criminal who genuinely believes her deeds to be in the best interests of her victims. In this way, she can justify any act, great or small. There is no evil as ghastly as evil which calls itself good, and is peddled in public as such. Think of temptresses, of self-described soothsayers, of women who lure children from their homes for nefarious purposes. They are all of this kind.”
As he spoke, his audience became more and more agitated. It was not clear if this agitation was in objection to Chase’s claims (how could he speak so ill of his mother?) or in sympathy with them (as they considered their own mothers’ abuses). The crowd grew in its loudness so that it became difficult for Chase to be heard over the din.
“Let the woman speak for herself!” cried a man from the front row.
Chase took the cue. He stood back and extended his arm to his mother, suggesting the floor was hers even though the cage confined her to just a few square feet of it. She chose to remain seated and rocking.
“Oh Winny boy, you know I ain’t done none of those things to you,” she said. “And certainly I ain’t done none of them for you. Maybe that’s what you mean by ‘a certain kind of woman’? But tell me and the rest of these good people, would you, what criminal is the man of hubris? What criminal is the man who recasts himself in every scene as the hero or the victim?”
Chase smiled at this, and though he opened his mouth to reply, there was no room in the theater for his voice. Sound, in its entirety, had been eaten up by a thunderclap, immediately followed by the galloping of hail on the roof. The suddenness and violence of this noise sent a ripple of fear through the audience. But once the brief storm had subsided—it lasted twenty seconds at most—they laughed. They had been tricked into believing, for a moment, that an act of nature was something more sinister. Relieved of that notion, they found themselves very much amused by it. A timely little joke upon them all.
But then, the thunder returned. This time it did not stop. It did not arch and peal like real thunder. This was a different sound, and the crowd again grew restless, until the double doors at the front of the hall opened and a bull moose entered, its antlers as wide as a rowboat. The creature ran the length of the aisle to the stage, then turned and retreated, exiting the theater with surprising grace, its hooves tip-tapping on the carpet.
The audience followed.
Out in the streets, they were treated to further delights. Ostriches, flamingos, tapirs, spotted elk, and a black leopard with yellow eyes ran west along Walnut Street. These were the inhabitants of the brand-new Philadelphia Zoo, mysteriously escaped en masse.
After that, Chase made no effort to regain his audience. To those who did return to the theater, he simply bowed and bade a good evening. He said there was nothing more he could impart to them. He only hoped that they would take to heart what they had heard and seen that night.
In the coming days, the Philadelphia police, firemen, and postal workers, as well as hundreds of private citizens, mobilized to recapture the zoo animals. Though the search was exhaustive, very few of the nearly eight hundred escaped animals were ever located.
Meanwhile, Winston Albert Chase had extended his speaking tour with sold-out dates in a dozen cities along the Eastern Seaboard. Reports of the outlandish events that had accompanied his talk in Philadelphia spread, and audiences were eager to see if they might be repeated.
There was also considerable speculation about if and how Chase had engineered such a spectacle. Was the whole show an elaborate stunt, with rented circus animals playing the part of the zoo creatures, and a team of percussionists on the roof? There were some who accused Chase of chicanery. And there were others who lauded him as a great entertainer. Then there were those who took him at his word, and by extension cast blame on his mother. The woman was indeed a witch, they insisted. (And it was such a beautifully ironic twisting of his own sentiment that Chase could not have planned it better himself.) This theory was most popular among those who had been present at the Walnut Street Theatre.
Of course, Chase, his nephew, his mother, and even the large man—an ex-con and a failed actor whom Chase had hired as a favor to a friend—gave interviews asserting that the night’s events were pure coincidence. And indeed, they were not repeated at subsequent shows.
But it should also be noted that the original cast did not reassemble for these later performances. Chase’s mother was replaced with a retired ballerina, and his nephew with a second cousin. A new large man was commissioned in each city, typically found near the docks or rail yard. Anyone of sufficient size and seeking an easy night’s work would do.
It was the loss of the nephew, who was headed to Harvard and did not have the time for additional shows with his uncle, that most pained Chase. He missed the youth’s antics, the way he could pull anyone to him. Chase, lonesome in unfamiliar cities, thought fondly of the trouble they could have found together.
His mother he missed the least.
The woman was indeed a burden to her children, though not in the ways Chase had claimed. She was a person of great abilities, it was true. But as she insisted from her cage, she had never used these abilities to Chase’s advantage or disadvantage. Instead, her love was for animals. She could speak to them, calling them out of dens and burrows. She fed them from her fingers and would go missing for days, following them through the woods near the family’s remote home. She could not bear their mistreatment at the hands of humans, whom she thought to be a brutal, useless species. And on the rare occasion that she traveled into the city, she would unlatch the gates of yards containing beaten and starved dogs. She could do this with her mind, even from the confines of a buggy or train, a pack forming in her wake wherever she went.
1
On August 4, 1889, Barton Heydale spent his lunch hour with a prostitute named Roslyn who lived and worked in a two-room apartment in Wolfe’s Hotel on Railroad Avenue. The apartment was above a lunchroom, where Barton often stopped for something to eat after his visits with Roslyn. But on this day, he was consumed with the trouble of making a decision, and so he chose to forgo his meal in favor of sitting in Roslyn’s tiny kitchen and smoking cigarettes.
The thing he was trying to decide: where, and when, to kill himself.
Barton had not set upon his path to suicide lightly. He’d assembled his justifications, which read as such: he was lonesome; he was generally disliked; and he was ugly. None of these conditions, he felt, had any hope of improving. They would only worsen as the months and years passed.
Barton was twenty-nine years old and the manager of the only bank in Spokane Falls. This position should have garnered him respect and power. It instead earned him nothing but ire from the local citizenry, who, it turned out, had little trust for institutions, financial or otherwise. As a result, Barton had not married, or even made a single friend, in his six years in Spokane Falls. The strain of this lonesomeness had taken a toll on him physically. He’d grown portly and unfit. He wheezed when he walked too quickly. And to top it off, he’d just the afternoon prior received a terrible haircut.
Strangely, though his hair would grow back, it was this final offense that convinced him he was beyond salvage. He could not continue to exist in his current form. So, today would be his last. His last breakfast, his last time washing his face, blowing his nose, tying his shoes. And here with Roslyn, his last fuck. The fucking had been the same quality as always; no great send-off. This observation depressed him even more.
After each cigarette he finished, he pitched the butt out the kitchen window and watched it spiral to the alley below, the last bits of ash and smoke forming a satisfying tail. Then he rolled and lit a new one. If Roslyn’s apartment were on a higher floor, he reasoned, he would jump from the window. But Wolfe’s was only two stories tall. In the other room, Roslyn snored, asleep in her bed. She was a drunk. The later in the day he called on her, the more likely he was to find her asleep or sick. On this particular day, she was already stewed by the time Barton arrived at noon, and barely able to finish performing her services before nodding off.
Even if Barton could not jump out of the window, he did think he’d like to jump from something. That seemed a good way. Dramatic and quick. He would do it someplace where everyone in town could see. Then they’d all feel bad for how they’d treated him. They’d be so sorry, they’d reexamine their whole lives and ways of being. Maybe some of them—those who’d known him most immediately—would kill themselves as well, unable to cope with their role in his death. It cheered him slightly to imagine. He would jump from the bridge into the river. That was his choice. He’d made his decision and that felt good too.
He kept an eye on his watch, and when it said five minutes to one, he stood up from the chair, ran a hand through his terrible hair to straighten it, left his money for Roslyn on the kitchen table, and headed back to work. He was very strict with his employees about taking only an hour for lunch, no more. He adhered to the same rule himself. So if he was not going to kill himself right then and there, he felt he must return to his desk, even though it was a Sunday and no one else would be at the bank to see if he came back on time—or at all, for that matter. Barton worked seven days a week. He had never been absent or late. And today, just because it was his last day, would be no exception.
—
When the end of his workday did come, Barton locked the bank and walked with courage and purpose to the Post Street Bridge as planned. When he got there, his pace slowed. He stopped in the middle and assessed the situation. He had wanted witnesses, a horrified and grieving public. But weren’t there perhaps a few too many witnesses? The shores were taken over by families seeking solace from the late afternoon heat in the shade of pines, their feet in the water, children splashing nearby. Should children see such a thing? Barton had his ethics to consider. Also, the river was low. The summer’s temperature had been unrelenting, and now, in August, only a foot or two of water passed below the bridge. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t swim and was counting on drowning in the mighty Spokane.
He backed away from the edge. He would have to do something else. He assured himself he would not dillydally. He would take his life in the privacy of his own house that very night. A public spectacle was not his style after all. Let the people of Spokane Falls learn of his demise later, through whispers and rumor, a haunting of sideways information. Did he really . . . ?they’d ask whenever they passed the bank. And the answer would be Yes, he did.
He’d hang himself in his parlor as soon as he got home. There was an oak crossbeam above his doorway that would be perfect for the purpose.
—
Barton lived just north of downtown. His house was on a hill and from his front windows he could see Spokane Falls spread out before him. ...
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