Harry Kirby, Part Two: His Other Crimes
This is the second in a two part series. Click for part 1.
A daring escape
They had timed it perfectly. As soon as the jailer left his post for supper, they sawed through the final threads of steel that were still holding them in their cells. They convened in the hallway and began their work on window bars. They knew there was no turning back—the damage to their cells was obvious and nothing that they could do with their rudimentary tools would fix the missing bars back in place. They worked with urgency, using bar soap to dampen the noise and lubricate the blades, as the teeth of the saws took bite after bite out of the window bar steel. The minutes wore on, but their progress was swift, and inside of a half an hour, they had breached the window, poking their heads out over the jail yard in the summer sky.
They looked down—the height had seemed much shorter looking up—but they were prepared. The ringleader of the two, Harry Schroeder, had MacGyvered a rope out of his bed’s blanket, and he tied one end to a remaining bar. The other end he cast out the window and it dangled, limp—the next stop on their way to freedom. They shimmied down to the yard, dropping the final few to the ground, trying to land as quietly as possible. All that remained was to scale the perimeter wall. It was a sheer concrete face, and there were no handholds, but Schroeder had a plan. He grabbed a long pole from the rec yard, leaned it up in a nook in the foreboding fence, where a column created a 90 degree inside corner, and began to climb the pole. His pal, Joe, helped bear his weight, pushing him up as he climbed, sharing the burden. His knuckles scraped and tore against the rough face, but he pulled himself up and turned to help his friend. Schroeder laid flat on the top of the thick wall and extended his arm; Joe was just able to reach his hand, but once they were clasped, arm to arm, he knew they would top the wall.
Schroeder grinned and looked over at his accomplice. “So long, Joe.” He hung from the wall, dropped, and took off on foot, putting as much distance between him and the jail as possible—he knew they didn’t have long before they would be hunted by the warden.
Schroeder has some choice words, but Joe disappears
Harry Schroeder and Joseph Blunt were both thieves. They had been indicted on charges of grand larceny and were being held at the Queens jail in New York City awaiting trial. Schroeder, after his daring escape, returned to his home in Brooklyn, and was picked up by detectives one block from his house 6 days later, on September 4th, 1919.
Joe Blunt, on the other hand, slipped away from authorities and was never apprehended.
Joe’s new life at Letchworth Sanatorium
Free again, he left New York City, but not before collecting some valuables he had stashed, and soon found his way to Thiells, New York, a town north of the city on the west bank of the Hudson River, where he found work at the Letchworth Village Sanatorium.
Knowing that authorities were looking for a Joseph Blunt, he gave them a new name: James Joseph Crawford. Still, going casually by “Joe”, but with a new surname.
He was an attendant to the nearly 1,400 psychiatric patients at Letchworth. It was a large institution and quite new, having just opened 8 years prior. It was pioneered to offer more humane institutional care for those who could not live on their own.
Not long after arriving there, he started to have feelings for one of the patients: Lillian White. She was about 24-years-old; he was 38-years-old, 14 years her senior. She was a good patient who had a number of privileges on campus, and her job was to work as a waitress. According to other patients, they had a “fiery love affair”. Lillian would slip love notes under his plate in the cafeteria and he would do the same with her. Authorities noticed, and confronted Joe about the affair, but he denied everything.
Joe continued to mingle with Lillian and other patients and lived up to his reputation as a ladies-man. Other staff at the institution gave him a nickname: Bluebeard. The term originated from a macabre fable about a man who killed five wives and kept their bodies in his home, but it was also used to describe a serial romanticizer and heartbreaker.
Joe’s roommate and friend later told reporters that he would get cards from all over the country from women he had once dated. A couple of 1920’s showgirls, “Jean and Alice” were the authors of many of the cards.
Thiells, New York, was nestled at the foothills of the nearby mountain range, the Hudson Highlands. The nearest mountaintop to Letchworth Village is present-day Cheesecote Mountain. Joe went exploring around the peak and had discovered a large slab of rock that had been eroded below it, forming a small cave. He dug it out further and enclosed it, creating a crude shelter. He stole rugs from Letchworth, stones from a nearby home’s construction site, and other furnishings to make it a little more hospitable. He would wrap up tightly in blankets to ward off the cold, and make fires for warmth. He would invite patients out to his mountainside home for romantic rendezvous.
In with the new, out with the old
In the summer of 1921, a new nurse arrived in Joe’s ward named Ruby Howe, and he was smitten with the 23-year-old woman. He showered her with attention, and Lillian was enraged. One day, in a violent and angry outburst, Lillian bit Joe’s hand severely, and the infection that followed threatened his life. Staff recalled that he had kept his hand bandaged for a long time afterward before recovering. And though the infection had abated, the grudge that he held against Lillian had not.
Lillian continued to write love notes to him, and at the end of summer, on September 16th, 1921, he invited her out to his mountain retreat one last time. His cave was about a hundred feet from the precipice of the mountain, and he coaxed her to the top of the mountain, where, using a small stone as a bludgeon, he beat Lillian White to death. He stripped her of her clothes and burnt them and left her body to rot.
Joe’s flight from Letchworth
As Lillian’s body was picked clean by the raptors on the mountaintop, Joe’s romance with Ruby blossomed. One day that winter, Joe brought Ruby out to Cheesecote Mountain, under a pine tree not far from where Lillian’s body lay, and proposed to her. She said yes, and on February 16th, 1922, they went to nearby Nyack, New York, to get married, but they kept the marriage a secret. On the marriage certificate, Joe listed his profession as “embalmer”—he claimed to Ruby that he had been trained in embalming and had worked in New York as an apprentice to an undertaker.
Three weeks after their marriage, Letchworth was investigating several thefts, and suspicions were pointing to Joe. He told Ruby that he feared that “a process of elimination would put the responsibility on him.” So he fled. Ruby later said, “He didn’t send me any word or tell me where he was going, and I had no idea what had become of him; the people there were saying he had probably committed suicide, and I guess that’s what I thought, too.” Ruby was crushed: she was madly in love with Joe and he had deserted her.
After a month with no word from Joe, Ruby decided to return to Maine to be with her mom and her stepdad, who lived in Saco/Biddeford.
Lillian’s remains discovered, a sculpture created
Just as Ruby was leaving, a discovery was made at Letchworth: a boy was picking early spring flowers on Cheesecote Mountain and had found Lillian’s decaying corpse. The woman’s skull had been crushed and the coroner ruled it a homicide.
Letchworth officials were quick to deny that it could have been any of their runaways, and the identity of the body remained a mystery.
This wasn’t the first scandal to happen near Letchworth, and some influential men in nearby New City wanted answers. They contacted the police commissioner of the NYPD, who assigned a special detective to the case: Mary Hamilton—the first female detective in the history of the NYPD. She recalled that one of her colleagues had assisted in a previous case with an identification from skeletal remains, and so she reached out to him for help.
Former police captain, Grant Williams, took the skull and made a sculpture from it. He described the process in detail to a reporter from the Washington Times, a DC paper. First, he sterilized the skull with formaldehyde, and then he crafted a crude neck, made from a wooden curtain rod. Then he mixed up a batch of plasteline, a non-hardening modeling clay, and coated the entire skull with about a 1/2” thick coating, carefully following the contours of the bones. From there, using geometry and anatomical proportions, he crafted the nose, the lips, and the eyes. Grant took a few liberties as an artist to try and bring harmony to the whole visage, but he endeavored to be as scientific as possible in his work.
As a stroke of good luck, her entire scalp, with the hair attached, was recovered from the mountaintop because of the unusual way it decomposed, and it was utilized in the recreation. Shoulders and a neck were approximated and tastefully clothed, and, in two days, the work was complete.
Mary Hamilton took the entire assembly in a large hat box to Letchworth Village and showed it to Dr. Little, the man in charge. He recognized it right away as a missing female patient: Lillian White. Mary took the sculpture to the cottage where Lillian had been living 8 months prior, and showed it to the staff there. Two of the attendants recognized the sculpture as Lillian as well. With the three positive identifications from the sanatorium, she then traveled back to New York City to visit with Lillian’s family.
Mary lived in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, and she asked Lillian’s older sisters, Rose and Catherine, to come from Brooklyn over to her apartment to take a look at the sculpture. They arrived on Thursday, May 4th, 1922, and their recognition was instantaneous—they exclaimed, “My god, it is Lillian! I can tell by the face! It is the face of my dead sister!” Catherine, overcome with emotion, fainted on the spot. A reporter who was present, wrote, “her face, gray as death from the shock, bore a striking resemblance to the gruesome clay model.” When she revived, she swore vengeance upon whoever had murdered her baby sister.
The hunt for Joe Crawford, and the revelation of a new identity
Mary, in concert with local law enforcement, began looking into Lillian’s past, and Joe Crawford’s name emerged right away. The coroner believed that the blows to Lillian’s skull were made by a left-handed man, and though Joe was right-handed, staff recalled that the recovery to his right hand would have forced him to use his left. Mary quickly discovered his cave, and even found amongst Lillian’s personal belongings (that were retained by Letchworth), a snapshot of Joe seated at the mouth of the cave looking out through a telescope. Mary was so interested in the case that she devoted “all her time to it for months without compensation.” She was convinced that Joe was responsible.
They tried to track him down, but he had vanished from Letchworth about 2 months prior as the investigation into the thefts was looming over him, and he had left little trace.
Once again, Joe was on the run, and started a new life. He shed his old identity, and donned a new one. But there was one piece of his old life that he could not live without…
After several weeks without contact, Joe called on his new bride, Ruby, in Saco, and explained to her that his name wasn’t really Joe Crawford at all. With profuse apologies and grand promises for the future, he persuaded her to take on his new name, and in April of 1922, she became Mrs. Harry Kirby.
Harry’s arrest in Newburyport
Harry willingly went with the officers in Newburyport. He knew there was no use of a struggle. They later recalled that he was a perfect gentleman.
He quickly denied any involvement with the killing of Aida. He said, “I have no blood on my hands. I found the body and took it to the Gray cottage to protect someone.”
He bragged, “I invited several people to enter the cottage after the body was brought there, but nobody took the offer.” One of the first things that he said to investigators was that Ruby wasn’t involved. He said, “She has nothing to do with this case. She knows nothing about it.” He didn’t want her “persecuted” by authorities. He confessed “I’m a crook but not a murderer.”
As he was being taken into the Newburyport jail, he made a passing comment that he had “nothing particular to live for,” concerning the jailers that he might try and take his own life. There was a guard posted outside of his cell on suicide watch.
William Coffin, a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote, “Harry ate a breakfast of ham sandwiches, doughnuts, a piece of pie and coffee with a relish and zest which in no way indicated a disturbed conscience was affecting his appetite.”
Governor of Maine Brewster called the Newburyport police, skeptical that they had apprehended Harry, chastened by the thought that despite their herculean efforts, Harry had managed to escape the state. His doubts were extinguished when Newburyport police checked to see if Harry’s upper teeth were false (which they were). A Newburyport resident who had a camp on Lake Maranacook who was familiar with Harry also ID’d him, removing any doubt.
Harry credited the picture of him published in the Boston Globe for bringing his capture. William wrote, “He laughed and remarked that it was a good likeness and that a person might easily recognize him after seeing it.”
Harry was watched closely and a city physician was called to administer lithium bromide (a sedative) when he showed “signs of nervousness.”
Harry taken to Maine
Around 2:00PM that afternoon, officers from Maine arrived to take Harry, and he walked with them from the jail, covering his face with his hat. There were mobs of people in Augusta and Winthrop promising vigilante justice, full of piss and vinegar—reports of up to 5,000 people—and so authorities decided to hold Harry temporarily in Portland.
That morning, as Harry was being arrested as a fugitive in Newburyport, Ruby was being transported from Saco to Augusta to be questioned. Ruby told authorities that Harry had told her that he had discovered Aida’s body and taken it to his cottage. She also revealed one of his aliases, explaining that she had married Harry as “James Joe Crawford of New York”. After her interview, she was on the verge of hysteria and was given medical attention and a constant guard. Harry, meanwhile, expressed concern to his jailers about his wife, that he feared she might be at risk of suicide.
In the middle of the night (technically the morning of Tuesday, May 26th), authorities took Harry from Portland to Augusta, to avoid the crowds of that day. They posted a guard in front of his cell, again out of concern of suicide, and they took his shoes from him, for fear that he might make a noose from the laces. He slept that night just two doors down from where he spent the night at the YMCA as a free man just a few nights prior.
Crowds continued to swarm Augusta on Tuesday, and it was decided that they would wait to arraign Harry until Wednesday in Winthrop.
Harry’s Arraignment
An advance guard of motorcycle police were sent from Augusta to Winthrop. They readied the way. When Harry stepped back on Winthrop soil from the safety of his police escort, he placed his cap in front of his face to foil photographers and hustled inside. The Town Hall building, the largest building in the town, where dances and meetings were often held, was fashioned into a court, and Judge Foster read the charges against Harry. He pled not guilty, and he was held without the opportunity for bail until the next grand jury session which wasn’t scheduled until September. Immediately after the hearing he was returned to Augusta where he would be held in jail awaiting the next hearing.
Harry goes on a walk with investigators
He was brought back to Winthrop again in late afternoon to walk investigators through his movements the night of Aida’s death. They went on the same train that had carried Emma and Aida from town to a stop near a cottage, the “Edgewood Cottage” which had not been known to have been previously involved in the incident. When he arrived with investigators, he went to the ice box on the porch, found a key to the back door, and let them in. In the living room, he pointed out a couch where he said that he had found Aida’s body. He said her clothing was stuffed under a living room table. He walked the route from the Edgewood cottage to the Gray cottage, where he was living. He was unflappable—"a cigarette dangled carelessly from the left corner of his mouth as he pointed out the route over which he carried the body. He pointed out the place where he threw the revolver into the lake.” Men were stationed offshore in boats searching for the weapon. Harry tried to indicate how hard he had thrown it to help them better position themselves (a diver was scheduled to arrive from Boston later to assist in the hunt for the gun). When they arrived at the Gray cottage, he became anxious and he refused to enter.
Day 10 - Harry comes clean
On the tenth day of his detention, after repeated interrogations, Harry’s condition had deteriorated. There was some speculation that he was suffering from withdrawal from recreational drug use and was particularly vulnerable.
Harry called County Attorney Frank Southard to his cell and with a deep breath, said, “I’m guilty of all the crimes you charged me with.” He told Frank that he had shot Emma, murdered Aida, and set fire to their cottage. He said that he was drunk from a pint of liquor that he had bought from an Augusta bootlegger and shot Emma in a ‘drunken frenzy’. He marched Aida down the train tracks back to his cottage and bound her, after which he returned to her cottage and torched it. When he returned to his cottage, he went straight upstairs and choked Aida to death. He said he covered her body with the feather tick because he couldn’t stand the glare of her eyes.
He considered how to get rid of the body. His first idea was to dump it in the lake, but then he heard about the men dragging it with a grappling hook. His second idea was to bury it in the woods, but then he heard that Deeka, the scent dog, would be searching the woods. As the body decomposed, and the smell intensified, he decided to flee.
There was speculation that the motivation for Harry’s confession was to avoid the possibility of facing murder charges for Lillian White in New York, where it was possible to be put to death by electric chair. Maine’s maximum sentence was life in prison.
In addition to the murder, attempted murder, and arson charges, he also confessed to additional various robberies and explained where they might be able to find the loot. Harry had a habit of burying things.
In speaking to motive, Harry said that he knew that Aida was worth “about $30,000,” and he knew that she had access to the safes of certain businesses in town and he planned to force her to open the safes. He said he prowled at night and stole what he could from cottages around the lake, and he made plans to kidnap Aida and extort her for her family’s wealth.
After his confession, Harry spent 8 hours with a Boston newspaperman and told him the story of his life from his earliest recollections. They paid him $500 for it. A Boston Globe writer who witnessed the telling, said, “Harry is egocentric. He gloried in the yarn he told, and his cunning little eyes glittered as he gave the details one by one. At times he laughed and joked. He knew he was going to get into the newspapers (as he eagerly sought since his arrest). The fact that he practically dropped out of the newspapers for days spurred him on.” He believed that his real name was Louis Blunt and that he was born in Bangor.
On the same day, Wednesday, June 3rd, a forensic ballistics test revealed that the bullets fired into Emma came from the revolver that was discovered under the steps of the Gray cottage (that were earlier discovered by the Press Herald reporter).
Day 11 – Harry makes confession “official”
The following day, Harry made his confession “official”, repeating every word for a court stenographer who would produce a transcript for trial.
Up to this point, Harry had refused legal counsel, content to speak for himself.
In Newburyport, the officer who had proudly sported the stickpin that Harry had given him was ordered to return it to Maine authorities. As it turned out, it was yet another of Harry’s stolen goods.
The next day, Bert Fowler (the same officer who went up in the Jenny plane) discovered sixteen .32 caliber bullets in a paper bag under the walk that connected Harry’s cottage to the outhouse. Along with bullets, he found a wristwatch, a small diamond ring, a string of pearls, a locket, and a broken chain, all of which were identified by Aida’s brother-in-law, Fred Moulton, as having belonged to Aida. Fred told reporters, “I’d give $100,000 to have 15 minutes with that man.”
The case against Harry was air-tight.
Request to transfer Harry
Several weeks later, the Sheriff of Kennebec County petitioned the governor’s office to transfer him to Thomaston prison because he believed that he would be safer there. Governor Brewster responded and claimed that there was no legal mechanism to do so, and that he must remain in Augusta until trial.
On September 3rd, 1925, an Augusta grand jury indicted Harry on the three charges, and the next day he was assigned a pinch-hitter public defender: Ransford Shaw of Houlton, Maine, the former attorney general of the entire state.
A few days later, Harry was arraigned again in superior court, and he pled guilty to arson, but not guilty to the charges of murder and attempted murder.
Suicide
A week later, on September 14th, 1925, Harry carefully positioned a blanket on the floor of his cell and laid in the cot in such a way that only his back was visible to a casual observer. He had cleverly hidden a razor blade in his cell and he used it to slash his wrists, the blood pooling quietly below the blanket. Sheriff Cummings discovered what he had done perhaps 20 minutes after the cut was made and found that Harry was nearly unconscious. Only a trickle of blood flowed. On-call doctors responded immediately and moved him to the hospital. Despite their efforts, Harry Kirby died at 1:30PM that afternoon in his hospital bed.
Harry was to appear at court the next day for his trial, and according to his lawyer, he was expected to reverse his plea on the 2 serious counts to avoid the need for a full trial.
He left a note:
“Dear Sir,
I have thought the matter over and have decided that I would be far better sacrifice my life to the State of Maine rather than plead guilty to a brutal and vicious crime I am not wholly guilty of. If my wife does not claim my remains, I’d like to have you surrender them to the Bowdoin College Medical School for purposes of study (if they care to claim them).”
Bowdoin Medical School ceased to exist several years prior unbeknownst to Harry.
The Sheriff couldn’t account for the presence of the razor. There was some speculation that a visitor might have brought it for him, but he hadn’t had any visitors lately—not even Ruby. Perhaps he had it hidden away for months.
Ruby was contacted, and she declined to collect his remains. She was off somewhere in Aroostook County, and her mother and stepfather were caring for her daughter. There were no other known relatives of Harry’s, and so it was left to the state to dispose of his remains.
Emma’s miraculous recovery
Emma Towns was scheduled to go into surgery the next day. She sat nervously on the bed, wondering whether she would awaken from the general anesthesia that would render her unconscious. She had made a miraculous recovery in the months since she was at death’s door.
She was reflecting on the tragedy that had stolen her best friend and her home when she had a tickle in her throat.
She coughed a few times and the tickle became worse. She coughed more vigorously, hurling something from her throat into her mouth. She spit it out and looked in her hand. The surgery the next day was no longer necessary. Her body had miraculously cast out the poisonous intruder. She looked at the lead lump with awe and disgust.
It was the bullet that had nearly killed her.
Return to Harry Kirby, Part 1: The Killer Amongst Them
This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, Harry Kirby, Part Two: His Other Crimes. To hear Harry Kirbys’s full story, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.
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Sources For This Episode
Newspaper articles
Various articles primarily from Bangor Daily News, Daily News, Lewiston Daily Sun, Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston Evening Journal, The Boston Globe, and the Times Herald, here.
Written by various authors including Akilah Johnson, Annmarie Timmins, Bernice MacWilliams, Nancy West, Richard C. Duncan, Roger Small, and Roger Talbot.
Photos
Photos from various newspapers and from MaineMemoryNetwork.
Credits
Created, researched, written, told, and edited by Kristen Seavey
Writing, research, and photo editing support by Byron Willis
Research support by Bridget Rowley