Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Lionel White didn’t just dabble in true crime; he spent the better part of his writing career in pulp purgatory. During the 1940s, he published Underworld Detective, Detective World, and Homicide Detective, magazines whose tawdry, hyperstylized layouts and unusually violent stories make for astonishing reading even today. In the early 1950s, White turned to fiction. He wrote several straight crime novels, the boldest of which, To Find a Killer, is a book of such brutal rage that it would make Mickey Spillane blush. (“My beautiful wife turned to me in her sleep and softly murmured, ‘Harry— Oh Harry.’ It was right then, in that very second, that I made my decision. Me, Marty Ferris. I decided to kill my wife.”) In the mid-1950s, White began writing caper novels which dealt with the meticulous planning and execution of heists — and in the years that followed, this subgenre would become his own private turf. His best books, Death Takes the Bus, Clean Slate (filmed by Stanley Kubrick as The Killing), and The Big Caper, endure not just because of the ingenuity of the knockovers but because of his ability to bring out his characters’ fears, desires, and fatal flaws. Though his fiction was revered by readers and critics, he never left the world of true crime behind. And he would still crank out an occasional yarn when the mood struck or his creditors knocked. This one, however, appeared back in 1942. It is quintessential White — from the first dark, brooding sentence to the last.

Clue of the Poison Pen

This time he had made the move alone. He couldn’t help but think of this one fact above all the others as he sat there in the small, conventionally furnished apartment at 536 Boulevard in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tall, broad of shoulder and stocky, brown hair already receding and shot with a few gray strands, he was only 26, but already, within these last weeks, Perry M. Williams had aged rapidly. He was a harassed, lonely man — a man who spent his days and nights in a maelstrom of fear and worry.

Across the room from where he sat slumped in a deep upholstered chair, was the dressing table at which Mildred Seymour Williams, his 22-year-old wife, had sat so many mornings during those five years of their marriage. On it were the fragile bottles of perfume, jars of makeup material; the dainty, oddly disjointed French doll which she had loved. And in the polished mirror, where his own image made a shallow reflection in the dim light of the room, he saw nothing but her lovely face as he had seen it so many times in the past. Hers was a slender, oval face with soft brown eyes beneath a curtain of fine auburn hair.

He tried not to think of Mildred. Tried not to think of the past at all. But little things kept coming back like so many shadowed ghosts to haunt him until his tortured mind was a mad kaleidoscopic pattern of the years of their life together.

He had thought this latest move might help, but it really hadn’t at all. And yet he knew he couldn’t have stayed on at the old address where they had last lived together. The house at 640 Mayland Avenue, S.W., from which she had disappeared back on November 21, 1941. Everything in that place had constantly reminded him of her and so he had moved. He hadn’t intended taking her belongings with him at all, but then at the last minute had told the truckman to bring them along. He wanted to see her things, even though he knew to do so was an exquisite torture.

He remembered now how happy they had been when they made the move from the furnished rooms at 1117 Stewart Avenue to the Mayland Avenue apartment. She had loved having her own furniture, their own apartment, their privacy. And now she was gone and he had nothing. Nothing but his memory of her and that was worse than nothing because it was something to remind him constantly of his loss; something to twist and embitter and ravage him.

He was a strong man but was unable to cope with the ruthless disaster which had overtaken him. His friends could give him no help; not even the police could do anything about it.

Worst of all, of course, was the uncertainty, the terror of not knowing where she might be: the agony of mind and heart brought about by the wild and uncontrollable imaginings of a heartsick soul — this was what was wrecking him. She was gone and now he didn’t know where to turn.

Instinctively his eyes went to the telephone and for a passing second it occurred to him to call the police once more. He started to get up but then a second later slumped back helplessly. He knew what the answer would be. It would be what it had been each time he had called these last few weeks. They would know nothing. They could do nothing.

And then, as his eyes slowly closed and his heavy face seemed to relax into a mask of utter futility, the sharp, imperative jangle of the telephone disturbed the dead air of the room. Within brief minutes Perry Williams was to find the answer to his enigma. He was to find the peace of knowledge. But it was to be a peace distilled of tragedy and blood and violence.

High winds and sheets of rain beat with an unrelenting violence across the breadth of the city. Great sign boards keeled beneath the wild fury of the storm, wires were down and the facilities of Atlanta’s sewage system were incapable of coping with the tons of water which flooded the gutters until the streets ran in mad torrents.

It was the middle of March and the entire South was being lashed with the pre-spring gales. Hardest hit was Georgia. Down Atlanta’s Stewart Avenue flowed a veritable river of mud, water and debris. And into the cement basement of the old-fashioned frame dwelling at number 1117, water seeped in a turgid, never-ending flow until it reached, a height of more than six feet.

Odds and ends of old, discarded furniture floated in silent, drunken fashion. Mud and silt and the accumulation of years intermingled to give off a dead, musty odor.

And then on March 18th the winds suddenly died and the heavens cleared beneath the crashing orange of a rediscovered sun. The storm was ended and once again the city settled down to clear away the aftermath of the rains and fury of the weather.

In the house at 1117 Stewart Avenue, Tom Griffin, 26, and for these last six years unselfishly carrying the burdens of the eldest son, turned to his widowed mother and smiled down at her frail figure as she sat rocking gently back and forth in the kitchen chair.

“Ma,” he said, “it’s a mess downstairs. If we weren’t so busy, me and the kid would get down there and clean up. But I guess we better hire a couple of men to do it.”

Minnie Lee Griffin looked up at her son and shook her head. A slight figure, tired and with slender, drooping shoulders, her face was thin and weary with the years of struggle. The almost black eyes made deep shadows in her face and there was an odd, downward twist to her small, worried mouth.

“Don’t worry about it, lad,” she said. “You boys just keep on working and let me take care of the house. This is my job and I can still manage it all right.”

Tom nodded and smiled back at her. But, he decided that he would still make the arrangements. His mother, only 46, had of late shown signs of premature age. Always frail, she had worked hard for her children since her husband’s death. She had kept house and cooked for them and had even taken in boarders. She had worked too hard and worried too much. Her withered hands, gray hair and the lines around her eyes were visual proof of it. He knew that she would likely enough forget all about the cellar.

Later that afternoon he hired two Negroes to come in the following day and drain out the basement and clean it up.

Minnie Griffin left early the next morning to go downtown and get in some shopping. She and a neighbor decided to go together and make a day of it. Tom and his younger brother, J. W. Griffin, 16, left the house a few minutes afterward for work. Meantime, the hired men had arrived and Tom had sent them into the basement to start cleaning it out.

The big fellow, his shoulder muscles bulging beneath the thin cotton fabric of his shirt, stood at the top of the wooden steps and shook his head. He turned to the little man at his side.

“Boy,” he said, “is that some dam’ mess. Look like this here basement been the meeting place of a hurricane. She’s going take some back labor to straighten out.”

His eyes made out the outlines of the broken debris, the mud and silted floor and the stained cement sides of the cellar. Already the water itself had receded until there were but isolated puddles in a desert of filth and muck and trash.

“She’s dirty, all right,” his companion said. “Goin’ be plenty of work here,” he added as he started down the stairs.

First they righted the overturned work bench and then stacked broken furniture in one corner. Everything was mud-encrusted and they made little effort in the beginning to do more than move things to one side so that they might be able to clean out the silt in tin buckets. They worked hard and it was long past noon before they made much headway.

“The junk that folks can hang onto,” the little man said. “Now why do you suppose they want that ol’ sewing machine?”

“Why they want anything down here is more’n I know.”

They worked on and by mid-afternoon their labor had reduced the shambles to some degree of ordered arrangement.

“Take this here trunk,” the little man began, pointing at an ancient metal automobile luggage carrier which looked as though it had been removed from some sedan of the early 1920s. “Now what you suppose they keeping this for?”

“Probably filled with somethin’ or other,” his big companion said. “Let’s put it in the corner.”

They leaned down and started to lift it. The little man grunted and then dropped his end.

“Dam’,” he growled. “If this ain’t the heaviest dam’...”

“She sure is. Now what you s’pose is in this thing to make it weigh like this?”

The small man wiped the perspiration from his brow. He sat down on the trunk for a minute and then looked up.

“One way to find out,” he said. “Han’ me that bar an’ I’ll pry her open.”

Less than one minute later they burst through the cellar door at the top of the stairway and went running across the kitchen. When they reached the open air both began screaming.

It didn’t take long. It seemed as though there were hundreds of people there in less than five minutes. Somewhere, in a house down the street, a woman, seeing the rush of people and having heard those awful yells, had the sense to call the police. She thought it might be some sort of riot.

The men were hardly coherent, but the first ones to arrive realized through the terrified shrieks that down there in the basement they had come across a dead body. Oddly enough, no one went into the house — they just stood and waited for the law to arrive.

The first cop on the scene went downstairs and came back in a hurry. He closed the door behind him and then sent a brother officer to the telephone. Within minutes, Detective Superintendent J. A. McKibben, accompanied by Homicide Detectives D. L. Taylor and J. M. Austin, were pushing their way into the house and down the rickety basement steps.

The dim light of the naked electric bulb hanging from a slender cord in the center of the basement was supplemented by the powerful police flashlights as they bent over the trunk. The little Negro had thrown the lid back and had pulled the gray worsted woman’s coat from the ghastly burden which had made the trunk so heavy. Brown hair matted and stained a mottled red covered her disintegrated face. A frayed rope had been tied about it to pull the slender body into a gruesome huddle as it lay there in the trunk. The nauseating odor which rose from the decayed corpse sent the officers reeling back.

As hundreds converged outside the house of death, and reinforced police fought to keep back the ever-increasing crowd, a trackless trolley car slowly made its way down Stewart Street and passed the house. The windows on the left side were crowded with the morbidly curious, attracted by the mob and the sight of a dozen squad cars and an ambulance. A heavy, package-burdened female turned to the slender, elderly woman at her side.

“Why, Mrs. Griffin,” she exclaimed, “it looks like they’re in front of your place. Yes, I’m sure it’s your home where something’s happened.”

Mrs. Griffin looked out the window. She nodded as she started for the exit door.

Morgue attendants were carrying their gruesome parcel across the cement sidewalk in a canvas stretcher as Mrs. Griffin approached. Stopped by a burly officer, she told him in a low voice that it was her home. She asked what had happened. The policeman looked down at her and felt a surge of pity. He took her arm and then forced his way through the crowd.

Flanked by detectives, Perry Williams followed Coroner’s Physician J. C. Blalock into the morgue. His right arm was couched in a white sling which went over his shoulder. His cheek was scratched and the red marks made livid rivers in the dead white of his haggard face. Bloodshot eyes automatically sought out the marble slab and the pathetic outlines of the figure beneath the starched sheet.

His steps faltered and the detective half supported the heavy man as he slowly went on. A sigh escaped his bloodless lips. Fingernails cut deep furrows in the palms of his clenched hand.

They pulled the sheet back, and the sigh crescendoed into a high wailing sob which was suddenly choked as Perry Williams rocked back on his heels. The officers saved him from falling.

Later, in the outer room, he muttered a few broken words to the detectives.

“It’s Mildred, all right,” he said. “Mildred — oh, my God...”

They had taken the rope from her once lovely throat. They had unwound the coils from beneath her knees and straightened her body. With alcohol-soaked gauze they had cleansed the ugly wounds on her face and breast. There was nothing they could do about the deep indentations of the skull. The black vacant hollows where her front teeth had been battered back into her throat were charitably concealed by her bruised and torn lips. Little was left of the face, but even as it lay in a pathetic heap on the morgue table, the girl’s body still looked from a distance slender and young and oddly alive in death.

That night Perry Williams once again repeated all he had gone over so often before. He told it in a broken, harsh voice. A voice which seemed to cry out for vengeance.

“That day, November 21, Mildred went to work as usual in the Whitehall Street shoe store where she was a clerk. She left before noon, and that is the last I ever saw of her until tonight. I can’t understand it — how she happened to be in that trunk in the Griffin house. We used to live there a few months back, you know. And police had searched that house looking for her after those mysterious telephone calls.”

Officers nodded gravely. Later, they questioned Williams about his injured arm and the scratches on his face. He explained that he had fallen and hurt himself.

Williams was permitted to go home and detectives were at once assigned to check his story about falling, as well as to establish his whereabouts on the day his wife disappeared.

Meantime, officers were holding three men and a woman for questioning. Within the last few hours they had interviewed more than a dozen persons, and they had turned up a mass of amazing evidence. The difficulty was, unfortunately, that it might be of inestimable value once they had found the killer — but it failed to point to the killer himself.

Detective Superintendent McKibben called a conference in his private office with detectives and plainclothesmen who had worked on the case, before interviewing the people he was holding.

“Here’s what we know,” he began, “at this point. These are the facts we have without dispute. To begin with, Mrs. Williams disappeared on November 21st. She started for work and that was the last seen of her, until the day her body turned up in the Griffin basement. The only clues we have are negative, with the exception of one. The positive clue is the fact that rope has been found in the Griffin house similar to the rope which bound the corpse.

“The negative clues are the facts that the girl’s expensive wedding and engagement rings, as well as a valuable breastpin, were still on the corpse when she was discovered. That and the medical examiner’s report that she had not been criminally attacked.

“This would tend to eliminate either a robbery or a sex motive for the crime. There is no insurance angle; she left virtually no estate. She was not murdered for money.

“The wounds would indicate that she was killed on or near the spot where the body was concealed. Now a strange angle enters the case at this point. You all remember that at the time of her disappearance, that is, a few days later, her relatives began receiving telephone calls saying that she was being held captive in the Griffin house.”

He stopped for a minute and eyed the detectives listening to him.

“I’m not blaming anyone,” he went on. “But two of you men searched the place at that time. Unfortunately you were looking for a live woman — not a dead one. Now I want to know one thing — does anyone remember seeing the trunk in the cellar at that time?”

A tall, thin detective stepped forward.

“Yes,” he said. “I helped search the house and I saw the trunk. I didn’t investigate it. The fact that she might have been murdered never even occurred to me. I wasn’t looking for the hiding place of a dead body. But the trunk was there then.”

“Which,” McKibben said, “adds another unusual angle. The killer must have made the phone calls. And it is a strange thing for a murderer to first conceal a victim and then attempt to tip off the place of concealment.”

He stopped to light a cigar and the officers could feel a tightening in the room’s atmosphere while they waited for him to go on.

“So far,” he continued, “we have no known motive for the crime. But somewhere there must be a motive. Murders don’t just happen. From this point on, I will review exactly what we know of the victim herself, of her husband and of the people who were connected with them in one way of another.

“Detective Taylor has interviewed the girl’s mother, Mrs. J. J. Allen; her grandmother, Mrs. W. W. Smith; and her aunt, Mrs. J. T. Neal. Each of these three relatives were very close to the Williamses. All three agree on two definite points.

“The first point: Perry and Mildred Williams were a happily married couple. They were never known to fight, there was no jealousy of any kind between them. They were very much in love with each other. The second point: Neither Perry Williams nor his wife had any relations with any other person. Mildred was a perfect wife and neither before nor after marriage had gone with any man other than her husband. They were a model couple.

“On the other hand, Mrs. Smith, the grandmother, has one unusual piece of information to contribute. For a period of three to four months before the girl’s murder, she had received a series of poison pen letters. Frequently the letters were accompanied by clippings from Dorothy Dix’s newspaper column. The clippings were all along one line — advice for women to stay away from other women’s husbands. The letters were vicious indictments against Mildred herself — warnings that she must stay away from another woman’s husband.

“Now, from what we know of the victim, it is a complete mystery why she should have been sent the letters. We are certain that she never did go near another woman’s husband. Thus, we can draw but one conclusion at this point. Whoever sent the letters must have been a psychopathic case who imagined that Mildred Williams was a bad woman.”

Again the chief of detectives stopped for a minute. His assistants by this time realized the technique he was following. Unable to draw any leads from the clues he had at hand, he was, by a series of psychological deductions based on definite facts, attempting to discover the criminal by the process of elimination.

“There is just one more thing,” he went on. “I refer now to the telephone calls which were made to relatives of the dead girl soon after she disappeared. The calls were all along the same line. The phone would ring and then whoever was making the calls would either hang up, or else would wait a minute or so and offer the information that Mildred Williams could be found at an address which later was to prove mythical. The only time the correct address was given was the time the Griffin house was mentioned.

“There is but one of two deductions here. First: The calls were made to mentally torture the husband and relatives of the girl. Second, the more logical, the person making the calls, probably the killer, was having a battle with his conscience and intended to confess or at least see that the body was found and put the family free of anxiety. And then, at the last moment he lost courage.

“Inasmuch as the phone messages likely came from the person who had, previous to the murder, written the poison pen letters, we can safely assume that our killer not only suffered from a persecution complex but very likely suffered from a bad conscience as well.

“There is just one more pertinent fact. Analysis of the handwriting of the letters indicates a woman. A man’s technique in a like case would have been more direct action. And, as far as the victims of the phone calls are concerned, the voice, although highly muffled, sounded to be that of a child or a woman!”

As he stopped talking, Detective Taylor, who had accompanied Williams home, entered the room with Motorcycle Policeman G. Herbert Williams, the young husband’s brother.

“I can add one possibly salient factor,” Taylor said. McKibben nodded for him to go ahead.

“Williams told me a few minutes ago,” he began, “that once Mildred received a poison pen letter accusing her of having relations with Ken Hubert. Hubert is married to Mrs. Griffin’s daughter, Ruth. Williams, knowing how upset his wife was, at once took her to see the Huberts. They talked the letter over. The two young couples had always been very friendly, and after discussing the matter, all agreed that the charges were ridiculous and completely without foundation.”

“Ken Hubert and Ruth have been married for about a year. Their marriage, from all I have been able to find out, is as ideal as was that of the Williamses. It doesn’t seem possible that whoever wrote the letter could have been right. But whoever did must have had the idea he or she was protecting Ruth and Ken’s marriage.”

As Taylor stopped talking, McKibben again took the floor.

“Inside,” he said, “we are holding four persons. Virtually everyone else who might be involved has been eliminated. But the four we are holding — three young men and a woman — either lived in or had access to the Griffin home. All knew the victim and her husband. Any one of them might have had the opportunity to commit the crime. Any one of them might have been the voice on the telephone; any one might have written the letters.”

“Those four are Mrs. Griffin; her 26-year-old son, Tom; her 16-year-old son; and Hubert, her 22-year-old son-in-law. I want them brought into this room!”

Mrs. Griffin, her head held high, entered first. She was followed by the boys, defiant and at the same time bewildered. Once seated, they looked toward the chief of detectives.

McKibben waited a minute and then started talking. He looked directly at Ken Hubert.

“Hubert,” he rasped, “someone wrote Mildred Williams warning her to stay away from you. You were living at the house the same time the Williamses had rooms there. Now I want you to explain...”

He didn’t have a chance to finish. Mrs. Griffin had leaped to her feet.

“He didn’t,” she screamed. “He didn’t have a thing to do with it. You leave Hubert alone.”

Quickly she was calmed and McKibben waited a minute until the woman had relaxed. He turned to the youngest Griffin boy.

“Son,” he said, “you have a high-pitched voice. I want to listen to you make a phone...”

Once more the place was in an uproar. Once more Mrs. Griffin had leaped to her feet. Once more she was defending “one of her boys.”

But this time, McKibben changed his tactics. He had the three young men sent from the room. He and two detectives were alone with the woman. Speaking with a deep kindliness, he turned to her.

“Mrs. Griffin,” he began, “don’t you see, they were the only ones who could possibly have done it, could possibly have concealed the body...”

But this time the interruption was completely without hysterics. Mrs. Griffin didn’t get to her feet, didn’t scream. She merely stopped him in a dead, calm tone that from the very first syllable demanded attention.

“No,” she said. “Not one of them. What was done was done to protect my family, and they shall be protected still. Not one of them could have done it. They were all working. But I was at home that day!”

With the exception of the thin, high voice, endlessly going on in the weird monotone, there was the hushed silence of a tomb in the room. At one side, before a battered table, a police stenographer sat, taking down quick notes on a long sheet of legal foolscap. A dozen high police officials and detectives, representatives from the district attorney’s office, a man from the coroner’s department, all stood breathlessly and listened.

The voice continued from deep in the chair.

“... and it was just after noon when she came in answer to my phone call. I hated her, but this time I was glad to see her. I wanted to tell her some things — a lot of things. I had talked it over with God and now I was going to talk it over with her.

“She hadn’t taken my warnings. Yes, it was I who had sent her those clippings and those letters. I had tried to threaten her and I thought it would be enough. But it wasn’t — she kept right on. So then I decided to see her and have a talk with her.

“When she arrived, I asked her in and then took her to my bedroom. We sat down and I told her just what I thought of her. I suppose she did look surprised. Yes, she denied everything. But doesn’t any criminal deny a charge?

“She wouldn’t let me finish. She jumped to her feet and she started for the door. But I stopped her. I stood right in front of her and defied her. I can’t remember now for sure which of us first reached for the broom. But I think she did and I took it away from her. Tore it out of her hands.

“I know I struck her across the face with it. I remember thinking it strange the way the blood suddenly welled up in her mouth and then ran over her chin. Yes, I suppose that was when her teeth were knocked out. I was surprised, otherwise I would have been on guard. But she got past me and ran out of the bedroom and through the kitchen.

“I caught her there and I struck her again — this time on the back of the head. I hit her two or three times. She ran down the cellar steps then. The last thing she yelled was for me not to follow her. But I did. I dropped the broom and I went down after her.

“She was on her knees, as though she were praying, only I knew that it wasn’t prayer. She was frightened and weak, that’s all. So I picked up a club, or at least it looked like a club. I drew it back and it crashed into the top of her skull. It twisted her head around, but because of all her hair, it didn’t knock her out. Then I struck her in the face.

“After that I kept on hitting her until she crumbled. She kept whimpering, but I didn’t feel anything. Just hate.

“I sat over on the bottom step for a while and then I went to the work bench and got a length of rope. I tied it around her throat, then I doubled up her knees and pulled them up with the rope. After that, while I was planning what to do, I remembered the old auto trunk. I pulled it out from the corner and got the lid open. I hauled it across the floor and pushed her down in it. Then I went upstairs where she’d left her coat in the bedroom. I took it down and piled it on top of her.

“I shut the lid and locked it. I hauled the trunk back to the corner. By this time I was tired so I sat there and rested for a while. Then I once more went upstairs. It was late in the day now and I had a lot to do. But I was tired and so I went in and fell asleep for an hour.”

The voice came to a sudden stop. And the frail, gray-haired woman opened her eyes and looked around her. Then she spoke again.

“My oldest boy, Tom, likes his dinner on time, and so I slept only an hour and then got up and started cooking supper for him.”

Officials were stupefied as the confession came to its grimly ironic end. It was unbelievable to them that this slender, hard-working widow, a good mother and an honest, God-fearing churchwoman, could have made this confession.

Later Mrs. Griffin was to elaborate.

She had had, she maintained, biblical admonitions that Mildred Williams was trying to lure her son-in-law away from his wife. That was why, she said, she had asked the couple to move from her home. They had moved to an address less than 60 yards from the cellar where the girl’s murder had taken place.

She had tried to warn the girl with letters; later she had talked it over with Ruth, her daughter, and her son-in-law. But no one had paid any attention to her. And so, finally, she had taken matters into her own hands.

Mrs. Griffin’s sons and Hubert were at once released. Following several hours of sleep, the aging widow summoned officials and went on to explain how, following the crime, she had had no regrets and no remorse. She said that each afternoon, as soon as her housework had been completed, she made a habit of going down to the basement and sitting for several hours while she knitted on a quilt she was making for her daughter. She liked to keep an eye on the trunk.

Officers, at first perplexed that the body had lain in the cellar so long without giving off telltale odors, explained it when they realized the trunk had been of such construction that, when closed, it was virtually hermetically sealed.

On the morning of March 21, 1942, Mrs. Minnie Lee Griffin, head high and eyes defiant, stood erect and unflinching as she was indicted on charges of first degree murder and held without bail for the grand jury.