a little known but deadly sadist and rapist — Without a Trace
The Killers among Us, Book II
It was 1959, the end of a decade of turmoil and violence, and a threshold of more to come. While Americans struggled to control their lives in the aftermath of World War II, the start of the Cold War, and the rise of racial tensions, incidents of multiple murder seemed to increase, especially in the latter half of the decade. On January 11, an event occurred that would throw light on an earlier crime and bring to the publics attention a chilling phenomenon that shadowed the cultures progress.
Carroll and Mildred Jackson, along with their two daughters, were missing. They had been driving home from visiting family near Apple Grove, VA. A relative of Mildreds was also driving home and saw a car abandoned along the road that looked like Carrolls. She called the police with her concerns. Patrols checked the car and found it empty. It was indeed the Jacksons car, but there was no sign of them, either at home or with any relatives. As time passed and they failed to turn up, it was evident that something had happened to them.
Police scoured the routes that the family probably had taken, but there were no clues. The Jacksons were just gone. They had an infant daughter, 18 months old, and a girl, 5. Relatives were concerned that even the children were gone. It seemed strange that an entire family would go missing, with no sign of a struggle, no blood, and no trail police could track. It remained a mystery, and as days became weeks, searchers and worried friends turned up nothing.
There is no book devoted entirely to this crime, despite how sensational it was at the time, but summaries of the story have been passed along from one collection of crimes to another, gleaned mostly from newspaper reports. Yet, some authors who purport to have complete information about the perpetrators of such crimes have missed this one entirely.
To attempt to gather clues, investigators examined Carroll Jacksons background, and Colin Wilson supplies it in
. Jackson was a quiet, retiring man who attended a Baptist church and appeared to have no enemies. He did not smoke or drink, and had met Mildred at the same church, where she was president of the local missionary society. They lived in a modest home and took their girls to Sunday school regularly. There were no problems to speak of in the family, and no feuds with relatives or neighbors. In short, the Jacksons appeared to be decent people who lived their lives according to the correct social conventions of the times.
The familys disappearance was reported in a local newspaper, with photos, in the hope that someone would come forward with information. Perhaps someone had seen them with a suspicious person, or had spotted them somewhere after the car was found. It seemed that there would surely be some bit of information, and that hunch proved to be correct. A couple came and told police about a suspicious incident that had happened to them on the same day the Jacksons disappeared. During the afternoon, they said, an older-model blue Chevrolet wildly flashing its lights had driven up behind and around them, stopping quickly and forcing them to the side of the road. As they waited, they saw a man step out of the car and walk toward them, but sensing danger and thinking quickly, they had put their car in reverse and escaped.
But he had scared them. They remembered what he looked like: He was tall, had a thin face, heavy eyebrows, dark hair and unusually long arms. He walked oddly. They thought he might have had a gun, but they did not stay long enough to find out. His manner was threatening and they were certain that if he managed to reach them before they got away, he would have harmed them. They figured that he meant to rob them, but now they believed he intended worse. They hoped their information would assist the police with the missing family.
Theirs was just one more in a long line of strange and disturbing stories from the 1950s.
The world was a tense place during that mid-century decade. Communist governments controlled land from Czechoslovakia to China — and approximately one-third of the worlds population. The Western nations formed the capitalist bloc, and because of greater industrial progress Western Europe was much wealthier than Eastern Europe. That boosted their recovery from the wars, but the United States quickly became the dominant world power, offering the highest standard of living. It was also the envy of other nations and for some an enemy to be feared.
Yet even in the United States, things were not at peace. The youth culture resisted the naïve mainstream emphasis on clean, orderly, and disciplined families in perfect homes pursuing the materialistic American dream. As citizens struggled to restore a sense of innocence after the devastating world war, television came into more and more homes, offering guidelines for specific roles: Fathers were to be providers and mothers contented homemakers. Shows such as Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet taught Americans how to manage their households.
Yet bucking this idealistic trend were those who rebelled, and while some turned to art or communications to shake the system, some reacted with violence. For example, former convict William Cook got out of prison and went on a murder spree. Once abandoned by his father, he forced people to become his hostages before killing them. First was a family of five, whom he shot in their car. He drove around with their corpses before depositing them in an abandoned mineshaft in Missouri. Then he headed to California, where he killed a salesman. From there, he took two men hostage, but authorities grabbed him before he could harm them, and California convicted and executed him.
President Harry S. Truman emphasized the U. S. mission to defend free countries from communism, so armies increased on both sides of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe, and economic relief was exchanged in needy countries for political control. Those on each side viewed the other as the aggressor. In Indochina, French troops fought the spread of communism southward, while a political conflict in Korea provoked the United Nations to assist the South against the communist North. Eventually boundaries were defined between democracy and totalitarianism, and each side set about developing the most powerful weaponry possible. Advanced technology ushered in the age of military secrets, clandestine missions, and espionage.
Soon, paranoia became formalized. Starting in 1950, a young senator named Joseph McCarthy led a campaign against card-carrying communists that he claimed had infiltrated the government and the countrys communications systems. As the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee provided a venue for his hysteria, people were labeled as communist sympathizers and blackmailed into giving up other names. During the red scare government employees had to go through loyalty tests, and illegal measures were tolerated in the name of national security. The FBI kept records on people considered subversive and many people were ruined. Finally, in 1954, McCarthy was discredited by a senate censure. During this time, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were tried and executed for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets.
Those who could, gave voice to this gripping tension between good and bad people, and among them, one author wrote a chilling tale that seemed to both absorb and anticipate the national anxiety over threats to domestic safety.
As if expecting these cultural pressures to grip and motivate roving men who turned to murder, in 1953 Flannery OConnor published a short story entitled, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Known for twisting expectations into gruesome images, she probably never topped herself outside this tale.
It opens with a grandmother resisting a trip to Florida that her family desires to take, so in an attempt to scare them out of it, she describes the horrific crimes of the Misfit, a fugitive from a federal prison who had done something to some people. His crimes remain vague, but the womans worried tone conveys an uneasy fear of pervasive danger on the road: someone who doesn’t even know you and has nothing against you, could nevertheless come along and harm or kill you. The family goes to Florida anyway, taking her with them. Along the way, she raises the subject of the Misfit, warning the others of what he might do. The storys title refers to the fact that danger from strangers is increasing in America and its getting more difficult to feel safe. There once were better times.
The family decides to go down a dirt road to see an attraction, and of course, they encounter the Misfit. Having an accident, thanks to Grandmas cat, they seek help, and a car with three men passes by them and stops. The men are armed, and the grandmother, having seen a photo in the paper, shouts at one of them that he’s the Misfit. He affirms it, and tells her it would have been better for them had she not said so. Now they’re in trouble. The grandmother attempts to appeal to the mans better nature, and he apologizes for not wearing a shirt in front of the ladies. Nevertheless, its clear that his intent for them was formed as soon as he saw them. No appeal will budge it.
Even as the Misfit talks about being a gospel singer and one of his companions comments on how to fix the car, the other takes the father and son into the woods and shoots them. Then, they take the mother, daughter and baby, and do the same. The grandmother, aware of what’s happening, continues to remind the Misfit of what was once good in him. But he compares himself to Jesus, who suffered punishment for no crime, proving that the world is morally off balance. The Misfit figures that the only thing a person can do is enjoy whatever time he has, and since he likes killing people, thats what he does. He likes meanness. When the grandmother offers a touch of kindness, he jumps back and shoots her dead. Then he cleans his glasses and, without affect or remorse, tells his companions to dump her body with the others.
It was just this sort of cold predatory behavior that frightened people around the country, and with good reason, as television, newspapers, and newsreels shown in movie theaters covered the evident increase in demented or angry killers.
In Wisconsin, Ed Gein was arrested in 1957 for killing two women and desecrating multiple female corpses in cemeteries in his pursuit of preserving skin and body parts to act out a transgendered homage to his deceased mother. A more grizzly ghoul could not be imagined by novelists or screenwriters. In Los Angeles two years later, Harvey Glatman showed police after his arrest how he had posed as a photographer to get potential models to allow themselves to be tied up. He then took photographs of them as they began to realize that he intended them harm. He apparently most enjoyed those moments just before he murdered them. He killed three before a fourth escaped and alerted the police. Not much was known then about multiple murderers, but the country was learning that they were out there, almost anywhere, preying on strangers.
Near the end of the decade, another criminal deviation occurred in the form of a killing couple who had absorbed the youth cultures appreciation for social alienation. The Beats were getting attention for their angry poetry readings and a movie star named James Dean epitomized the feeling of disenfranchised youth in a popular film, Rebel without a Cause. Charles Starkweather, 19, viewed Dean as his role model, and with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, he cut a murderous swath through Nebraska during two weeks in 1958, killing her family, his friends and several strangers before he was stopped. Their death toll was 11, and she went to prison while he was executed.
America was shaken by the images of demented neighbors and roving strangers killing people senselessly. The availability of cars and cheap new motels, along with better highways, made the population more mobile, but this erosion of a cohesive community life also made people feel more vulnerable. Killers were striking at good folks, even at families, as if to undermine the countys very foundation. Prosperity clearly had a shadow side, a rather dark one, and police in Virginia were still trying to learn what had happened to the Jackson family.
It had been two months since Carroll Jackson apparently abandoned his car near Falls Church, VA. According to Colin Wilson, on March 4, two men were riding in a car near Fredericksburg, Va., when it got bogged down in mud on a back road. To attempt to get some traction to get out, they went searching for dried underbrush. As they gathered several armfuls to take back to the car, they made a shocking discovery. A decomposing man lay in a ditch, his hands bound in front of him with what appeared to be a necktie. The men ran back to their car, worked with haste to get out of the rut, and drove as fast as they could to alert the police.
Detectives found their way to the body. Clearly, the dead man had been there a while, but as it was winter, the body was somewhat preserved, even for that part of Eastern Virginia. It was clear that he had been shot in the back of the head. Then, as they removed him from the ditch, they made another grim discovery. Underneath him was a second body, that of a female baby. Whoever had killed these two had simply tossed the child in first. There was no sign that she had been shot, stabbed or strangled, and the pathologist later determined that she had been dumped in the ditch alive and had suffocated beneath her father, probably soon after he was tossed on top of her. It was a cruel and brutal killing.
It was not long before the police had identified the victims as Carroll Jackson and his daughter Janet. Investigators surmised that the killer had forced the car off the road, much like the man whod encountered the other couple that day, and had forced them to get into his car, probably the trunk. Assuming that Jacksons wife and other daughter had suffered a similar fate, teams of officers returned to the woods to search the area for their bodies. But after extensive time and work, they turned up nothing. Wherever Mildred and 5-year-old Susan were, they had not been dumped there.
It was not until March 21, more than two weeks later, that they finally came across the missing members of the Jackson family, much deeper in the woods. Two boys out squirrel hunting, Wilson says, came across an area that appeared to have been freshly dug. Curious, they went closer to have a look. One of them moved some of the loose dirt aside and thought he saw something. They bent over for a better view and dug a little deeper. Then they saw what looked like blond human hair. They pushed more dirt aside and realized that they had found someone buried there – a little girl. Startled, they ran home to tell their parents, who called the police. Since the discovery was in the area where they had been looking for the Jacksons, they assumed that the boys had led them to Susans shallow grave. It seemed a tragedy for this family, but it was about to become much more than that.
As the police carefully dug into the grave, they exhumed the body of little Susan. Beneath her was Mildred. They took the decomposed corpses to the forensic pathologist for a thorough examination. He announced that both victims had been raped and Mildred had apparently been forced into other sexual acts, as well as tortured before she was bludgeoned to death. She had a stocking loosely tied around her neck, as if used for leverage to force her to perform. Investigators believed that she may have been told to engage in a sexual act that disgusted her, possibly oral sex (Schechter confirms this), and perhaps had refused, so her killer had found a way via a collar to make her do what he wanted. She had been bludgeoned, but it was not clear whether this had caused her death or whether she had died from strangulation. Her body was too decomposed to offer a definitive medical opinion. Susan had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument, possibly a gun butt.
As the bodies were removed, several detectives walked around the area to see if there was any dropped evidence, footprints, or some indication why the killer had brought his victims to this place. But then the story gets confusing from one account to another.
Within a few hundred yards, says Wilson (and echoed by Lane and Gregg), detectives came across a cinderblock building which they already knew about. Two years earlier in 1957, they had found it full of pornography and morgue photos of dead woman. However, Newton and other authors say nothing about this building, indicating instead that a quarter mile from the bodies the police came across a shack. Its difficult to know which story is correct. Fredericksburg is not that close to Annapolis, and while some authors indicate that the first incident was just over the Maryland/Virginia border, it nevertheless seems a stretch to say that its quite as close to Fredericksburg as these authors indicate. Its more likely that because buildings were found near both incidents, they were confused by some authors as the same one.
Outside the shack near the Jackson grave, police observed fresh tire marks, which made them wonder if the driver from the Chevrolet who had stopped the one couple had perhaps forced the family into his car and had brought them here. It was likely that he had killed the father and dumped the baby so he could have Mildred and Susan at his mercy for his sexual pleasure. In fact, inside this shed, the police found a red button, and it turned out that Mildreds dress was missing a button exactly like it. It now seemed likely that the killer was familiar with the area, knew about this shack, and had brought his victims here for a clear predatory purpose. He then had killed them and buried them close by.
Yet there were no leads for identifying him, and the case became increasingly frustrating as the media sought answers.
The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder
Human Monsters
As investigators interrogated suspects and looked for anything that would help them solve the Jackson murders, an anonymous letter arrived from a man with suspicions about his friend. The following year, he was identified, according to Everitt in
, as Glenn Moser of Norfolk, VA. His friends name, he said in the letter, was Melvin Davis Rees, and he was a 26-year-old self-styled existential philosopher and jazz musician. Dark-haired Rees was intelligent and talented, traveling from one place to another to play saxophone, piano or clarinet. Rees had once attended the University of Maryland, but had dropped out before graduating. Ostensibly he had left to pursue a musical career. Their conversations were often filled with heady ideas and commentary on what life should be. One evening the subject turned to murder.
You can’t say its wrong to kill, Moser recalled Rees saying. Only individual standards make it right or wrong. It was a Nietzschean rendering of situational ethics, bold for the time. In fact, in 1948, Alfred Hitchcock had made a movie based on the idea, in which two intellectual college students kill a man to prove it, horrifying their professor, who had introduced them to it in the classroom. Even before that, in 1924, Leopold and Loeb had done that very act, murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago to prove that they were superior individuals, above the standards of ordinary people. (But they weren’t above being punished for it.)
Under the experience of Benzedrine, an amphetamine that made him talk excessively, Rees confided to Moser that he craved to have every intense experience, from love to death. According to Wilsons rendering in
, this conversation supposedly took place the day before the Jacksons were abducted. Then, when their murder was publicized two months later, Moser viewed his friends bold words in a new light. He already knew that Rees had been arrested on charges of assaulting a 36-year-old woman in 1955. Rees had tried to get her into his car and when shed refused, he had resorted to dragging her. The victim would not press charges, however, so the case was dropped, and Reess friends had dismissed the incident, Moser among them. But now he wondered. Rees was mild-mannered, but one never knew what lay in another mans heart, especially if he wanted to hide it.
To understand why Moser suspected Rees and why Rees might indeed have been the killer, we need to examine ideas that were floating around in the counter-culture at the time.
Being and Nothingness.
Beyond Good and Evil
During the 1950s, existentialism was popular among people in the counterculturemusicians, artists, poets, and the hangers-on who followed them like groupies. While it was primarily a 19th century philosophy attributed to the Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, several key European philosophers had updated the notions for application to troubled, post-war anxieties that plagued nations. The most notable of these were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who often discussed the ideas in cafés in Pariss Latin Quarter, making the image of the educated, cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking artiste into a popular model for others. They took their cue primarily from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, so well start with him.
He proposed ideas toward the end of the 19th century that had ramifications for more than a century on how certain psychopathic criminals perceived and excused themselves. In 1886, Nietzsche published
, in which he spelled out how morality is illusory and then postulated that crime might be regarded as an invigorating condition to make the human species stronger. Exploitation within society is normal, because life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker. In other words, life is a will to power, his title for a more forceful book in which he described the human ideal as an intense Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, including violence.
But the key notion is his proposal about moral behavior. Morality, Nietzsche said, was a system of judgments that coincided with the conditions of the moralists life. There was a master morality and a slave morality. People who could assimilate the will to power would survive, be honest about the aggressive instinct, become leaders, and determine what is good and what is evil. The greatest enjoyment, Nietzsche said, was to live dangerously, that is, to live on ones own terms. In the century to come, those who learned these ideas and desired to live dangerously would adopt Nietzsche as a patron saint — or sinner.
Having declared that God is dead in the modern soul and that Christian values shield us from our true selves, Nietzsche proclaimed that a moral genius, or übermensch, would overturn those values and create new ones based on the will to power. Without such a person to renew our society, he claimed, were doomed to go through phases of soul-deadening nihilism until we lose spiritual momentum.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre became famous for popularizing existentialism in a brief essay and for publishing the massive and obtuse,
He insisted that people were entirely free to choose how they lived, and that their choices defined them: You are what you do. With such freedom came the burden of responsibility, and individuals were essentially on their own. Everyone used everyone else and true bonding was not really possible.
One of Sartres associates was French-Algerian Albert Camus, who published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. The Stranger portrayed the antihero, Meursault, a man unreflective and utterly detached, showing what its like to be a stranger to oneself, ones friends, and ones own world: he’s indifferent to his mothers death, his girlfriends attempt to love him, and even his random murder of a man because the sun was in his eyes. Only when sentenced to death does he come to terms with his freedom. It is a depressing tale, but Camus seemed to have succinctly and disturbingly expressed the war-ravaged outlook of a generation of people who felt lost, detached, and out of place. His book was an international sensation, and he followed it with his essay about the Greek myth of Sisyphus–a man whom the gods condemn endlessly to push a large boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again. Because of our absurd metaphysical situation, Camus stated, we share the same fate as Sisyphus and our best response to lifes absurdity is defiance. Otherwise, well be crushed.
All three philosophers had a significant impact on the alienated subcultures of the 1950s, and their ideas about choice and morality were filtered into poetry, film, art, and music. Even murder.
Soon, Moser said in the letter, he confronted Rees, asking him directly whether he was involved in the disappearance of the Jackson family and their murders. Rees admitted nothing, but seemed evasive and would not deny it, and it was this behavior that most alarmed Moser. Even though Rees was his friend, he believed he had to do something. Anyone who killed another person should be punished, but he realized that if Rees could so easily slaughter an entire family, he might also kill again – or do something worse. If he were truly seeking intense experiences, he might subject people to unrelenting terror and torture. The idea was appalling.
In the letter, Moser stated that he believed Rees may have been involved in another murder as well – a woman who was killed in 1957. He said that he was a salesman and that he and Rees had been in the area at the time when Margaret Harold was murdered. Given the circumstances and Reess attitudes about killing, Moser urged the police to investigate and directed them to where he believed the itinerant musician might be.
They agreed that the lead was worth pursuing, but they failed to find Rees. He had moved out of his house and had not left a forwarding address. However, the contents of the anonymous note were sufficient for them to check his background. They discovered that he had once dated a woman from the University of Maryland named Wanda Tipton. That rang a bell, so detectives went to the university to ask for yearbooks to see what she had looked like. To their astonishment, she turned out to be a young woman who had been questioned when Ms. Harold was killed. They knew it was time to review the 1957 investigation.
The Chronicle of Crime
On June 26, 1957, Margaret Harold was in the car with her boyfriend, an army sergeant who was on leave for the weekend. In The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, Lane and Gregg describe what occurred. They had been driving together in a remote area of Annapolis, Md. (Newton indicates that they were parked), when a man in a Green Chrysler forced them off the road (Newton says he walked up to the parked car and identified himself falsely as the propertys caretaker). They wondered if he needed assistance, but his intentions were much more malignant.
He got out of his car and came over to them, gesturing for them to roll down the window. He showed them that he had a gun. (Newton indicates that he climbed into the back seat.) Then he demanded a cigarette. They had none and told him so. He demanded that they give him some money, and they refused. This response apparently angered him. He lifted the gun, pointed it at Margaret, and shot her in the face. (In
Fido says that he started to molest her, at which point the soldier ran. Wilson, too, indicates that he was in the back seat and he wound his fingers into Margarets hair, pulling her head back and shooting her when she told her boyfriend not to give him anything.)
The soldier (whom no source names), was stunned and horrified, but he also knew that his own life was in danger. Unable to save Margaret, he jumped from the car and ran as fast as he could across several fields until he found an isolated farmhouse a mile away where he was able to call for help. The police came to pick him up while another team went to the crime scene. As anticipated from the point-blank assault, Margaret was dead. Yet the attacker had not just shot and left her. He had also removed her clothing and sexually assaulted her after she died, leaving her exposed in the car. It was the epitome of craven disregard for a victim. And it signaled how bold the man was. Even as the soldier had run off, the attacker had nevertheless taken the time to get his pleasure from a corpse.
The sergeant gave a good description of the man – average build, somewhat tall, dark hair, clean-shaven, and rather ordinary looking with a thin face. There was nothing overtly threatening about the way he looked, only in his cold, brutal manner.
Looking for any type of evidence, investigators fanned out in the hope that the maniac driver had not gotten very far, or that he possibly had dropped something. In the process, they came across a cinderblock building with a broken basement window not far from the scene of the murder. This was the building, mentioned earlier, that they entered and found potential clues. Inside was a collection of violent pornography and morgue photos of women who had been murdered, many of which were taped to the walls. It was clearly a sadists hideout, kept secret for his sexual pleasure. That was also where the police had found the yearbook photograph of Wanda Tipton. She had attended the University of Maryland, graduating in 1955, and since she stood out among this odd collection, they set out to find her.
When Ms. Tipton was contacted and questioned, she claimed not to know anyone by the description the police had given her. That was a disappointing development. They had felt certain they would learn something from her that would make an arrest in this horrendous crime possible. In 1957, there were few forensic procedures for processing evidence, and catching killers often depended on finding them right away. But that was not to be. With no more leads, the case dried up, leaving the killer to move on in his predatory ways until he crossed paths in Virginia a year and a half later with the Jackson family, and possibly with others.
After receiving the anonymous letter in 1959, police compared the mass murder of the Jacksons with the killing of Margaret Harold and found significant similarities: A tall, dark-haired man traveling in a car, who approached people in cars to attack. A sexual assault on the females. A brutal disregard for the victims suffering. Operating in the same general area. It all seemed to fit, and despite Ms. Tiptons insistence that she did not know a man like the one they described, it seemed that she had actually known such a person fairly well. Wilson states that she later admitted that she had dated him but had given him up because he was married. (Perhaps he had told her so, but there was no indication that he was.) Her reticence may have cost investigators considerable time, but its unlikely that admitting to knowing him would have helped them to find him.
With what they now knew, they believed they had the jazz musician Melvin Rees dead to rights: They were certain that he was their man. They revisited the address theyd received in Mosers anonymous note, but still did not find him. They checked jazz clubs where hed played but no one knew where he was. Rees seemed to have disappeared, perhaps tipped by someone that the police were looking for him or merely anticipating the possibility after Moser had confronted him. In any event, he was gone, and for more than a year, the trail went cold and the murders had to be shelved to devote resources to more immediate concerns. But the Jacksons and Ms. Harold were not forgotten.
Then, the police received help from an unusual source.
The Psychic World of Peter Hurkos.
Peter Hurkos had gained international fame during that era as a seer, which inevitably got him involved in murder cases. Norma Browning, his biographer, recounts the episode in
Having fallen from a ladder in 1941, he claimed that he survived the accident with two minds – one of them psychic. He said he could see the future, travel mentally into the past, and learn about people from touching objects they had owned or going to where they had been. Leaving the Netherlands, he came to the United States, developed a successful nightclub act, and hobnobbed with celebrities and politicians. Many people wanted him to use his powers to assist them, from finding missing children to organizing their lives to solving crimes. One such person was Dr. F. Regis Riesenman, a forensic psychiatrist based in Washington, D. C., who invited Hurkos to visit at his own expense in June 1960. He wanted Hurkos to help with the Carroll case.
Browning says police had already questioned some 1,500 suspects and were focusing on more than 100 as good candidates. They accepted Hurkoss services, via Riesenman, but were dismayed by the publicity that accompanied his arrival in Falls Church. He predicted a resolution to the case within two weeks and said the man the police would arrest would be indicted for nine murders, not just the Jackson family. He went to the cemetery where the Jacksons were buried to get a psychic sense of them and also handled their possessions, accurately describing the position of their bodies when found. He knew how each had been killed and described the murderer as just over six feet tall, left-handed, with a tattoo on one arm. His arms were longer than normal and he walked like a duck. All of this was consistent with witness reports.
When Hurkos was taken to that area where Margaret Harold was killed and assaulted, Browning says he found a piece of the victims skirt still caught on a bush. He confirmed psychically that she was killed by the same man who murdered the Jacksons.
He also drew a picture of a house where he believed the killer lived and led the police to it. They were amazed that it was the home of one of their primary suspects, a trash collector. Browning says that upon the mans arrest (she doesn’t name him), he confessed to the crimes. The newspapers quickly printed the fact that Hurkos had solved the crime, but within 10 days (within the framework that Hurkos had offered), the FBI had located Rees. The Washington Post then ridiculed what Hurkos had said, calling his assistance a failure, but his biographer defended him against these charges.
She believed (and Wilson confirms) that in retrospect, it was clear that Hurkos was highly accurate about certain significant details. If Browning can be trusted, Hurkos accurately described the killers appearance and posture, and had picked out the house that had once been Rees home. Rees just had not lived there when Hurkos arrived. Hurkos also indicated that Mildred Jackson had only 31 teeth (she was missing one), which was confirmed by the autopsy report. And there was one more salient detail, but well get to that later.
A year went by before Moser heard from Rees, and Hurkos had already arrived in Falls Church to help with the investigation. Out of the blue, Moser received a letter letting him know that Rees was now living in Hyattsville, Ark., and working as a piano salesman in a music store in West Memphis. He provided an address. Moser realized that he now had a way to send the police right to Reess door. Hed been disappointed as hed followed the investigation in newspapers to learn that his earlier tip had failed to pay off. It had been difficult then to turn in a friend and he was now faced with doing that again, but he knew it was right. This time he went directly to the police department to show them the letter from Rees and provide everything he could to ensure a thorough investigation. Thanks to his intervention, things turned out quite differently for the jazz player.
Because Rees had crossed a state line, the FBI entered the case. Agents went to Arkansas, arrested Rees at the store, and brought the Army sergeant from Annapolis there for a line-up. He identified Rees as the man who had approached them that fateful night in 1957 and killed Margaret Harold.
The agents then searched Reess home. Although it seemed unlikely that there would be any evidence from the murders this far away, unless he had kept a memento from a victim, they looked through everything. Finally they struck pay dirt. Inside a saxophone case they found the evidence they needed. Rees had secreted a .38 caliber handgun in the case -the attacker in both cases had shot the victims with a .38. But more telling was the sheaf of notes written by Rees that described a number of sexually sadistic acts. One note was paper-clipped to a piece of newspaper, and when the agents examined it, they knew they had the best evidence they were going to get: the note described killing a man and baby on a lonely road, which resulted in a chilling confession: now the mother and daughter were all mine. The piece of newspaper was a photo of Mildred Jackson. It was as good as a token taken from the body or as actual property of the victim. No jury would deny the connection. In essence, Rees had offered a murder journal, and hed gone on to explain that he had indeed tortured Mildred and had drawn out her death in a sadistic manner. Lane and Gregg quote it thus: then tied and gagged, led her to a place of execution and hung her. I was her master.
A gun, a photo, a specific description by the killer tantamount to a confession, a line-up identification, and the suspicions of a friend – it was a good collection of evidence. Even as Rees was taken to Maryland to await his first trial, investigators started looking at other unsolved cases that bore possible links to this mad dog. They found what they were looking for.
Newspapers covering the arrest and trial of Melvin David Rees dubbed him the Sex Beast. He would be tried in both Virginia and Maryland. The police soon suspected him in the unsolved murders of four adolescent girls in Maryland, and Newton lists them: Mary Shomette, 16, Ann Ryan, 14, Mary Fellers, 18 and Shelby Venable, 16. The first two were found near the University of Maryland during the time that Rees had attended classes there. The other two were removed from area rivers. While prosecutors did not add these charges to those they already had against Rees, they supposedly believed they could use the information later if they had to. (Hurkos had indicated that the killer of the Jackson family would eventually be indicted for nine murders. While Rees was not indicted, the final total of his suspected murders was, in fact, nine.)
In Baltimore in February 1961, Rees was tried for the murder of Margaret Harold. Her former boyfriend, who had identified him as the man who had approached them and shot Margaret, testified, and the gun found in Reess possession proved to be a match to the bullet that had killed her. Rees was easily convicted and that jury gave him life in prison. Then he went to Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in September to be tried for the first-degree murders of the Jackson family. There his murder journal did him in, since his descriptions were so specific. This time after he was convicted, he was sentenced to death.
Then the story gets confused again. Wilson and Everitt write that Rees was executed (Everitt gives 1961 as the date, which is impossible), while Lane and Gregg offer what they consider a strange bureaucratic twist: Rees was ordered to undergo psychiatric testing in 1966. However, Newton indicates that Rees was not executed. Instead, after extensive appeals, his sentence was commuted to life in 1972 when the U. S. Supreme Court suspended all death sentences to evaluate the constitutionality of the death penalty. In 1985, he confessed to a reporter from the Richmond-Times Dispatch that he had killed two of the four unsolved murders in which he was suspected: those of Fellers and Venable. Newton writes that Rees survived for two more decades before dying in prison from heart failure in 1995. Since Newton extensively researched the case while he was writing a book about Harvey Glatman, who killed three women the same year that Rees started his spate of murders, Newtons information might be more accurate. Schechter confirms the information, but might simply be passing it along from Newtons book.
While criminologists and several authors of books about serial killers tend to neglect Rees, one musician (at least) found in him some grisly inspiration. According to the Web site, www.generalsurgery.nu, which posts lyrics about necrology, Grant S. McWilliams wrote a song, Crimson Concerto, based on his favorite serial killer, Melvin Rees. It is purportedly an anthem of strange behavior. The three-minute ditty describes slit throats, violins polished with human carnage, and an indifferent attitude toward – in fact, a craving for – suffering. The lyrics seem to get to the heart of what the existential Rees viewed as living for the moment, with moral concerns of no weight beside the extreme of raw sexual violence.
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Everitt, David. Human Monsters. New York: Contemporary Books, 1993.
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Friedman, Maurice, editor. The Worlds of Existentialism. New York: Random House, 1964.
Lane, Brian and Wilfred Gregg. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. New York: Berkley, 1992.
Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. New York: Facts on File, 2000.
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Sahakian, William. History of Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Wilson, Colin. The Killers among Us: Sex, Madness, and Mass Murder. New York: Warner, 1995.
–ed., The Mammoth Book of the History of Murder.