The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

While Vacher was still being tried, two schoolgirls disappeared on their way home from school in the village of Lechtingen, near Osnabriick. The bodies were later found in nearby woods. The limbs had been amputated and the intestines scattered over a wide area. A travelling carpenter named Ludwig Tessnow came under suspicion, and was taken in for questioning. He insisted that various stains on his clothes were brown wood-stain, and was released. Three years later, on the Baltic island of Riigen, two young brothers vanished. Their remains were also found in nearby woods, the limbs hacked off and the intestines scattered. The next day, a woman reported to the police that she had seen the children talking to the carpenter Tessnow, who lived in the village of Baabe and who had only just returned from his wanderings around Germany. Tessnow was arrested, and spots resembling dried blood were found on his clothes – there had been some attempt to wash them off. Tessnow again insisted that they were wood-stain. This reminded the examining magistrate of the Lechtingen murder of September 1898, and he sent to Osnabriick to enquire the name of the suspect who had been held; when he found that it was Tessnow, he had no doubt that he had caught the killer of the two boys. He also recalled that, shortly after Tessnow had returned in June 1901, half a dozen sheep had been killed and mutilated in a field on Riigen.

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.