Table Of ContentBrutes, Beast
and Human
Fiends
Ten True Stories
of America’s Most
Depraved Murderers
of All Time
By
Alan Hynd
Eternal Press
A division of Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998
www.eternalpress.biz
Brutes, Beast and Human Fiends
Ten True Stories of America’s Most Depraved
Murderers of All Time
by Alan Hynd
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-254-9
Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-255-6
Cover art by: Dawné Dominique
Re-EDITED BY NOEL HYND
Copyedited by: Shannyn Lenihan
Copyright Diane and Noel Hynd, 2010
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American and UK Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form,
including digital and electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without
the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for
brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of non-fiction, true crime.
Occasionally, however, names, places and incidents
were modified by the original author to respect the
privacy of certain victims and their families.
If your heart and stomach are strong
enough, then you will surely enjoy
this blood-chilling parade of murders
and other grisly deeds too ghastly
to mention here. This collection of
true stories of unholy horror and
unspeakable evil were written by one
of America’s most brilliant fact-crime
reporters—Alan Hynd.
Brutes, Beasts And Human Fiends
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Lethal Louise, The Black Widow Of California
2. “Pretty” Louie Amberg, Brooklyn’s Maestro of Murder
3. Killer Kate Bender And The Kansas Death Trap
4. “If Them Gators Could Only Talk!”
5. The Sausage Maker And The Cooked Cadaver
6. Little Lethal Lyda And The Constant Coffins
7. Chicago’s Perpetual Widow And The Fulfilled Prophecies
8. The Man Who Married Too Often
9. The Amorous Fiend Of West Virginia
10. Arsenic, Old Lace And Sister Amy Archer
Foreword
In many ways, I went into the family business. Writing.
My father, Alan Hynd, never graduated from high school but
somehow found his way onto the staff as a reporter for The Boston
Post around 1921. Born in 1903, the only son of Scottish immi-
grants, that was still pretty young to take up a reporter’s craft. But
nonetheless, he did. The rise and fall of Charles Ponzi, inventor
of the swindling scheme that bore his name, was one of my fa-
ther’s first stories in Boston. As a result, my father was frequently
assigned to police desks and began a career writing true crime
stories.
The career path later led him to other newspapers in New York
and Philadelphia as well as Trenton, N.J., which was his home-
town. He worked on those papers through the 1920’s and 1930’s,
which were particularly fascinating times in American history.
Almost all of his newspapers are long gone now and, sadly, so is
he. He died suddenly in January 1974.
But during his lifetime, my father saw, close up, the seamy
underside of American life in the early and middle Twentieth
Century. And he wrote about it, first for the newspapers, then
later for the American true crime magazines that flourished in
the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, then finally for the “big” magazines
of the time, like True, The Reader’s Digest and The Saturday
Evening Post.
The subject matter was not without its drawbacks. Covering
the Lindberg kidnapping in the 1930’s, my father had his first
generation American idealism forever tarnished by what he said
was the legal railroading of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, whom
he was convinced was only a bit player—if that—in a much big-
ger kidnapping conspiracy. He wrote about what he saw at the
trial, the inconsistency and questionable nature of the evidence
the incompetence of the defense attorney (who was hired by the
Hearst newspapers and was frequently asleep in the courtroom)
and the ulterior motivations of everyone to just get the case “fin-
ished” as quickly as possible —e.g, bootleggers in New Jersey who
were tired of having their beer trucks stopped by the state police
looking for the missing child. As a reward for his straightforward
reporting, my father was removed from covering the case by his
paper. He wasn’t giving readers what they wanted to read, his edi-
tors had told him. Many years later, he wrote a celebrated maga-
zine article called “Why The Lindberg Case Will Never Be Solved.”
The case never was and never will be, mainly for the reasons cited
in the article.
At other times during that era, he reported authoritatively
on the famous outlaws of the era, notably Dillinger, Bonnie and
Clyde, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly. During World War Two,
times treated him well. He had two best-sellers in 1943, Passport
to Treason and Betrayal from the East. This time the subject was
espionage, by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I would recom-
mend neither for historical accuracy. But it was wartime and it
was what the public wanted. From time to time, he would receive
unsolicited letters of praise from J. Edgar Hoover. He was always
contemptuous of Hoover and privately referred to him as “a fraud
who liked to come in and have his picture taken after the agents
had done all the work.”
On many occasions, he couldn’t resist giving some people
things they didn’t want to read. After presenting all the facts
about a prominent murder case in the Bahamas in the late 1940’s,
he was poisoned by representatives of a powerful and uncharged
suggested perpetrator. The would-be killers may or may not have
broken into our family home in Fairfield, Connecticut to plant to
poison in 1952. The assignment was nearly successful. I can re-
member the trips to the hospital, shrouded in silence and mys-
tery, when I was about 5 years old.
At another time, some mobsters just plain decided they didn’t
like him, so they kidnapped him and held him—at gunpoint and
for ransom—in a second floor room at the Hotel Dixie on Times
Square. His magazine, Official Detective, I think it was, delivered
$300 cash. Unmarked bills in an envelope, just like in the movies.
Only $300, you ask? Well, everything was cheap in those days
and the hotel was conveniently located in the West 40’s around
the corner from the editorial offices. One of the gunmen sat in
the window watching the street, twirling the chamber of a thirty-
eight. The bad guys saw all the movies too and wanted to present
themselves just the way George Raft did.
At other times, our home served as guests to certain question-
able folks who wanted to sell their stories. I remember in particu-
lar a Lebanese-American gangster from Bridgeport, Connecticut
who politely educated me how to fix harness races and boxing
matches while my father had a sit-down with his boss.
As I said, interesting times.
What conclusion did I draw from these events as I grew up? It
was, I decided, much safer to write fiction than cover true crime.
But I digress. Over the course of fifty years, Alan Hynd must
have covered more than a thousand police cases: domestic mur-
derers, swindlers, bank robbers, serial killers, extortionists, em-
bezzlers, con men. You name it, he saw it and put it on paper.
From time to time I personally met some of the people he wrote
about. They were, to say the least, memorable. One goon gave me
instructions on how to sneak up behind someone with a blackjack
and bop someone over the head with maximum effectiveness.
Another showed me how to deal cards from the bottom of the
deck and what to listen for if someone was doing that. I remember
another who kept calling our home phone number—never mind
that it was unlisted, this guy got it anyway—telling my father that
he was just out of prison and had a great story to tell. Well, he
was just out of prison. He was an escapee, in fact, and the calls
stopped when the cops caught him and sent him back. In terms of
press coverage, however, the Bahamian sorehead aside, often the
stipulations of these gentlemen were twofold: “Just tell honestly
what I done. And spell my name right.”
Brutes, Beasts and Human Fiends is a small sampler of such
accounts. These stories were originally published in various mag-
azines of the time, in various forms and several times, then in a
small anthology by this same title which sold well in 1964 and
then again in 1970. Thanks to the magic of electronic publish-
ing, it’s now back. I’ve updated some of the references, fixed some
story points that needed clarification over the years, but tried to
remain in the same voice and the same atmosphere.
These stories are true and the names are spelled right. My fa-
ther wrote with a smile, a wink in his eye and a sense of the ma-
cabre aspects of depraved human motivation. The victims you are
about to read about got gassed, shot, poisoned, stabbed, strangled,
boiled, broiled, ground up, blackjacked, bitten by snakes, bombed,
sent for swims in concrete blocks, fed to alligators, smothered and
bludgeoned. One of our killers, when he ran out of victims and
the cops were closing in, did a final civic improvement and even
killed himself.
In keeping with the style of the time, sometimes dialogue was
“recreated.” The reader is asked to kindly go with the flow. There
used to be an old newsroom adage that suggested that a writer
never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The facts here are
so bizarre that they never needed to get in the way. But despite
the grim subject matter, one might sense the author smiling and
winking between the lines.
I know I can.
Enjoy.
Noel Hynd
Culver City, CA
December 2010
Brutes, Beast and Human Fiends
Lethal Louise, The Black Widow Of
California
You would hardly have suspected that the pretty, well-stacked
little lady, who belied her fifty-one years, who tripped gaily out of
the women’s prison in Tehachapi, California that fine spring day
in 1939, had just been paroled after doing eighteen years in the big
bad cage for murder. Louise Peete, who, with a moss-and-honey-
suckle drawl, knew how to swear falsely on a stack of Bibles, had
convinced the parole authorities that she was ready to go and sin
no more. And the suckers had believed her—believed an unholy
bitch on wheels who had, before knocking off a millionaire lover
and stuffing his stiff in a booze closet, gotten away with three oth-
er scraggings and driven three jakes to suicide.
So here she was—the top arch-murderess of her era—all set to
go out, betray the chumps who had paroled her, continue on her
lethal ways, and perpetrate her masterpiece.
Lethal Louise, who had, over the years, gone under a variety of
monikers, now changed her name again, as easily as she changed
her dress. She began calling herself Anna Lou Lee. Or Mrs. Peete.
And she started looking for jobs as a housekeeper in fashionable
Pacific Palisades.
Who was this woman—this arch-fiend in skirts? She was born
Lofie Louise Preslar in Bienville, Louisiana in 1880— a member
of the female species dedicated to the proposition that the male
of the species are suckers. She belonged to that school of thought
which holds that the average man is also more or less insane, de-
pending on his degree of proximity to the exercise of the repro-
ductive prowess. Man, Louise held (and proved it for forty-four
years) attains complete sanity only immediately after reaching a
sexual climax; then, in a little while, say twenty minutes, the old
nuttiness begins to creep back again, increasing in intensity un-
til another climax is, in an hour or a day or a week or a month,
attained.
“Keep a man happy after dark,” Louise always said, “and the
daylight hours will take care of themselves.”
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