Bestial-The Savage Trail of a True American Monster by Harold Schechter

Author:Harold Schechter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780743483353
Publisher: Pocket Star Books
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

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Kansas City, Missouri

Bring in the slayer, dead or alive.

L. R. Toyne, Chief of Detectives,

Even before Moore and his escorts arrived in Creston, the strangler had already migrated southward to Kansas City, Missouri, where, within twenty-four hours, he added three more victims to his tally.

At approximately 2:00 P.M. on Monday, December 27, a twenty-eight-year-old workman named Raymond Pace returned to his home at 3920 Hammond Street after cashing a $7.50 paycheck for a construction job he had completed that morning. The instant he stepped through the front door, he was greeted by a feeble cry from the bedroom of his son, Victor, an alarmingly frail six-year-old who suffered from a tubercular spine.

“Mamma fell down the stairs,” the bedridden boy whimpered when his father hurried to his side. Pace rushed to the stairwell, but his wife, Bonnie—a slender, twenty-three-year-old brunette—was nowhere in sight.

He found her in an upstairs bedroom, her body sprawled across the mattress, her house dress yanked above her hips, ugly bruises on her throat. Later, Deputy Coroner C. S. Nelson confirmed that she had died of manual strangulation. Her body temperature indicated that she had been slain sometime between 10:00 A.M. and noon.

When Detectives W. S. Shumway and Roy Bondure arrived to question little Victor, the boy explained that he had heard someone arrive at the house earlier in the day. The caller—a grown man, judging by the sound of his voice—had been admitted by Mrs. Pace, who presently led him upstairs. Soon afterwards, Victor had heard a muffled commotion from above, then a heavy thud on the staircase. Seconds later, the front door slammed as the man fled the house.

Victor called out to his mother again and again but received no reply. Clearly something bad had happened to her. Judging from the noises he had heard, the six-year-old thought that she might have fallen down the stairs.

When the detectives asked Victor if he had any idea who the man was, the boy nodded and identified him as a truck driver named Robert McKinley, an old family friend. Victor hadn’t actually seen the caller but assumed it was McKinley, since (as he told the police) the truck driver “was always coming around to visit Mamma when Poppa was away at work.”

McKinley immediately became the prime suspect but was able to provide an airtight alibi. Though Raymond Pace was so broken up that he had to be sedated, he, too, fell under suspicion after investigators learned that he had known about and been fiercely jealous of his wife’s friendship with McKinley. As soon as Pace was coherent enough for questioning, however, he was able to supply a solid account of his whereabouts at the time of the murder.

Precisely twenty-four hours after the discovery of Bonnie Pace’s corpse—at 2:00 P.M., Tuesday, December 28—a Kansas City man named Marius Harpin returned to his house at 2330 Mercier Street and found both his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Germania, and their eight-month-old son, Robert, dead. The killer had strangled both victims with his bare hands.

Later, police learned that a family friend, J.

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