A lonely heart led Delphine Downing to her death.

The recently widowed woman had posted a personal ad in the hopes of finding companionship for herself, and a father figure for her 20-month-old daughter, Rainelle. Downing likely sifted through several responses before finding one from Charles Martin, a well-mannered and successful businessman from New York City who happened to love children—exactly the type of man whom Downing was seeking. In January 1949, she welcomed Martin and his sister, Martha Beck, into her home in Byron Center, a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Downing may have thought that she had met the man of her dreams, but in reality, she was about to live a nightmare. As it turned out, Charles and Martha weren’t brother and sister. Charles Martin wasn’t even the man’s real name. The people Downing had guilelessly admitted into her home were Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, a pair of swindlers with a complicated relationship and at least one murder under their belts. Downing and her daughter would become their next victims.

Beck and Fernandez were a decidedly odd couple who might have seemed incapable of the crimes they would eventually commit—and those they already had committed. The pair themselves had met through a personal ad, in 1947, when Beck was a 27-year-old nurse in Pensacola, Florida, and Fernandez a 32-year-old schemer from New York City, Beck, despite a successful career, found herself starving for companionship. Overweight and insecure, she was a single mother of two children, a daughter and a son. As a practical joke, one of Beck’s coworkers sent her an advertisement for a lonely hearts club. Though Beck was crushed by the prank, she desperately sought affection, and eventually submitted an ad that she hoped would rescue her from a lifetime of loneliness.

Fernandez wasn’t quite so romantic. To him, lonely hearts ads were all about money. He had a history of wooing the women he met through them, then pilfering their cash and jewelry before making a quick getaway.  Initially, he regarded Beck as just another mark, and cast her aside when he decided that his potential take wasn’t worth the effort required to court her. Fernandez changed his mind a few weeks later when Beck, recently fired from her job at a Pensacola maternity home, appeared on his doorstep in New York City. Realizing that Beck was so in love with him that she would cater to his every need, Fernandez agreed to take her in, and Beck happily settled into domestic life with her new lover.

Beck found Fernandez so captivating that she not only kept his house, but became his partner in crime. Posing as either his sister or sister-in-law, Beck traveled the nation with Fernandez to meet his lonely hearts victims and help steal their money. Beck also took on the self-imposed role of chaperone, jealously watching over Fernandez and his targets to deter the consummation of their relationships.

By the time Downing met Fernandez and Beck in 1949, the grifters had been at their game for over a year. Now they were seeking long-term cons: women they could swindle over extended periods of time. With Downing, they believed they had met their mark. For about a month after Fernandez and Beck moved into her home, Downing’s relationship with the man she knew as Charles Martin seemed promising. Downing invited Martin and Beck to Nebraska, her home state, where they met Downing’s parents. The young widow even planned to sell her property in Byron Center and move to California with her paramour and his sister. Martin seemed to be a gentleman and a provider, the type of person with whom Downing could eventually settle down.

The turning point came when Downing entered her bathroom on Saturday, February 26, 1949 and discovered that Fernandez had been keeping a secret from her. The swindler had suffered a serious head injury years earlier, and since then had worn a toupee to keep his damaged pate a secret. Now, as Downing beheld his bald, scarred head under the bathroom light, she became distressed and accused “Charles” and his sister of deceiving her.

Fearing that Downing would contact the police and end their charade, Beck and Fernandez decided that murder was their only way out. To quiet the agitated woman, Beck urged Downing to take sleeping pills. Downing did so. After she drifted into unconsciousness, Fernandez grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around a pistol once owned by Downing’s husband. Then, while Rainelle watched, Fernandez shot the sleeping widow in the head, using a single bullet to end her life. Fernandez and Beck buried Downing in her own basement, encasing the grave with cement to deter discovery.

With Downing out of the way, Beck and Fernandez had free reign to cash her checks and loot her home. However, they still had a problem. Rainelle, missing her mother, would not stop crying. Fernandez grew tired of the commotion and told Beck to kill the child, which she did two days after the elder Downing’s death by drowning the girl in a tub of water. Fernandez and Beck buried Rainelle next to Delphine, covering the grave with cement as they had done for the girl’s mother.

Beck and Fernandez could have taken this opportunity to make a quick escape from the scene of their crimes. Instead, they left the house to watch a movie. That decision led to their undoing. When Beck and Fernandez returned a few hours later, they walked in on police officers who had been called to the Downing home by neighbors worried about Delphine’s sudden disappearance. The officers took Beck and Fernandez into custody, and shortly afterward discovered the bodies of Delphine and Rainelle Downing. Realizing the gravity of their situation, Beck and Fernandez made full confessions to the Kent County district attorney in exchange for what Fernandez later claimed was a promise that authorities would not extradite the pair to New York and would instead prosecute them for the deaths of Delphine and Rainelle Downing in Michigan.

Why did Beck and Fernandez fear extradition? Because the Downing killings had not been their first murders. During their confessions, Beck and Fernandez admitted to killing 66-year-old Janet Fay, a “lonely heart” from Albany, New York whom Beck and Fernandez had bludgeoned, strangled, and buried in a Queens cellar the year before. Because New York imposed the death penalty and Michigan didn’t, Beck and Fernandez preferred to face the Downing murder charges rather than expose themselves to potential death sentences for the Fay murder.

After a series of legal maneuvers and an agreement between the governors of both states, Michigan authorities released their prisoners into the custody of New York’s justice system. In August 1949 a jury found Beck and Fernandez guilty of Janet Fay’s murder, and the trial judge sentenced them to death. Their executions in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison outside of New York City took place on March 8, 1951.

Students of the case believe that Fay and the Downings weren’t the pair’s only victims, as some of Fernandez’s previous marks had died under suspicious circumstances, and that as many as 17 other victims may exist. Regardless of whether they killed three people or 20, no one can dispute the fact that Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck were cold-blooded killers who blazed a trail of emotional destruction across the nation—a trail that ended when they stopped the beating of a lonely widow’s heart in West Michigan.

While jazz babies danced the Charleston and downed hooch in illegal speakeasies, more sinister crimes were taking place in the 1920s, both in the U.S. and abroad. Following are four creepy crimes from the less jovial side of the Jazz Age.

Note: These crimes are excerpts from my upcoming eBook, A Decade of Crime: The 1920s, set for publication in the spring of 2016. This will be the first in a series of eBooks that explore American and world crimes from throughout history, decade by decade. More details to come!

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1. The Angel Makers of Nagyrév

While their husbands fought during World War I, female residents of the Hungarian community of Nagyrév began canoodling with Allied soldiers from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp. When Nagyrév’s men returned from battle, a midwife named Júlia Fazekas, as well as her “assistant,” Susi Oláh, encouraged the community’s women—who were less than happy about resuming their lives as put-upon housewives—to poison their spouses with arsenic ob-tained from flypaper. These so-called “Angel Makers of Nagyrév” continued their killing spree throughout the 1920s, extending it to include parents, children, and other family members whom the women regarded as burdens. It’s estimated that the Angel Makers murdered 45 to 50 people before authorities discovered their crimes (which the women had been able to conceal because of the fact that Fazekas’ cousin was the clerk who filed the death certificates). Twenty-six of the Angel Makers stood trial; eight received death sentences (though only two, including Oláh, were executed), and 12 were imprisoned. Fazekas herself committed suicide in 1929.

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2. Fritz Angerstein

Whether it was mental illness or a more calculated motive that led to the December 1924 bloodshed in Fritz Angerstein’s villa in Haiger, Germany, one thing is certain: Angerstein was a deeply disturbed man who believed that the only way to escape his troubled life was to eliminate the people in it. Early in the morning of December 1, having recently learned that he was suspected of embezzling from the limestone mine where he worked, Angerstein stabbed to death his wife, Käthe, then killed with an axe his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, and the family’s maid. Angerstein used his axe again later that morning to kill four more people—two of his employees (a bookkeeper and a clerk), a laborer, and the son of Angerstein’s gardener. Angerstein then tried—and failed—to kill himself. When authorities arrived, Angerstein told them that bandits had attacked his family. However, physical evidence—including the fact that Angerstein’s fingerprints were found on the dagger that killed his wife—proved otherwise. Angerstein ultimately confessed to the crimes, for which he received eight death sentences—one for each of his victims. He was decapitated on November 17, 1925.

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3. Henry Colin Campbell

With a number of marriages—but no divorces—under his belt, Henry Colin Campbell was definitely not “husband of the year” material. Throughout the early 20^th century he preyed on lonely hearts who submitted newspaper advertisements looking for love. Instead, the ladies found Campbell, who took their money, then left them high and dry. However, these women were lucky compared to Mildred Mowry, who married Campbell in 1928, gave him the $1,000 in her savings account, and then disappeared. Her charred, bullet-riddled body was discovered a few months later along a roadside in Cranford, New Jersey. Authorities quickly tracked down Campbell, who was living with his “real” wife and children in the nearby community of Elizabeth. Surprisingly, Campbell didn’t deny that he had killed Mowry. Instead, he claimed that he had no memory of her death, having been under the influence of drugs at the time. The jury didn’t buy his defense and convicted Campbell of Mowry’s murder. He was sent to the electric chair in April 1930.

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4. Bertha Gifford

For ailing residents of Catawissa, Missouri in the early 1900s, Bertha Gifford seemed like a godsend. Initially, those who knew the middle-aged wife and mother looked upon Bertha as a kind woman who enjoyed caring for sick neighbors. However, that perception changed after George Schamel moved in with Bertha and her second husband, Eugene, bringing with him his sons, nine-year-old Lloyd and seven-year-old Elmer. According to Bertha’s confession (given upon her arrest in 1928), when Lloyd fell ill in August 1925, she gave him the medicine that the doctor had prescribed, but added her own touch—a dose of arsenic. Bertha did the same thing when Elmer fell ill a month later. Both boys died. Bertha also confessed to giving arsenic to Edward Brinley, a drunk man for whom she had fixed a bed in the Gifford home in May 1927. She stood trial for the deaths of Elmer Schamel and Brinley, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent the rest of her life in a mental institution. Bertha was suspected of killing as many as 17 people, including her first husband, but never stood trial for those deaths.

Halloween is the time of year when ghosts and ghouls come out to play. Whether these supernatural entities actually exist is a matter of debate, but there’s no doubt that ghouls of the human persuasion are very much a part of this world. Following are four of the creepiest true crime tales from throughout history—made all the more disturbing because of the fact that to this day no one knows which human monsters committed them.

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1.  The Axeman of New Orleans

Just reading the title of this entry, you know you’re in for an unpleasant tale. From May 1918 to October 1919, a mystery man terrorized New Orleans and surrounding communities, breaking into homes in the dark of night and killing their sleeping inhabitants, often with axes he found in the victims’ domiciles. The ultimate death toll was at least six, though some researchers place the number higher than that. Investigators considered several theories for the crime spree, including the belief that the Axeman was carrying out a racist agenda, as most of his victims were Italian-Americans. Another alleged motive was that the Axeman was simply trying to promote jazz music. In a letter published in newspapers and purported to be from the Axeman, the writer stated that he was planning to commit murders in the early morning hours of March 19, 1919, but would spare the lives of anyone who was listening to a live jazz band. New Orleans residents subsequently filled dance halls and invited scores of jazz musicians into their homes for impromptu concerts. The city was spared from axe-related carnage that night, but whether the letter writer was the “real” Axeman or simply a crank is a matter of debate. The identity of the Axeman of New Orleans remains just as mysterious today as it was nearly a century ago.

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2.  Bella in the Wych Elm

The human skull that four boys found inside a wych elm tree in 1943 near the community of Stourbridge, England has been a source of mystery—and fear—for decades. After one of the boys reported their find, police investigated the hollow trunk where the skull had lain and discovered an almost-complete skeleton…as well as a hand buried nearby. The bones belonged to an unknown woman who had apparently suffocated on the bit of taffeta that examiners found inside her mouth. The body had been inside the tree for about a year and a half, and the timing of the woman’s death and discovery—during World War II, when people went missing on a regular basis—made the process of discovering her identity difficult at best. In addition, after the murder, the phrase “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?” began appearing as graffiti around the region, adding a further element of menace to the mystery. Who was Bella? Did the graffiti writer know, and was that person the killer? A few theories have been put forward regarding the identity of the woman, one involving witchcraft, another involving espionage, but nothing definitive has been found to establish just who put “Bella” in the wych elm so many years ago.

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3.  The Hinterkaifeck Murders

When Andreas Gruber’s neighbors paid a visit to his farm on April 4, 1922, they were concerned because they hadn’t seen any of the property’s inhabitants for a few days. A horrific sight greeted them. As they explored the farmstead known as Hinterkaifeck, located in southern Germany, they found that the six residents of the Gruber farm had been murdered—and in brutal fashion. In the barn were the bodies of Andreas and his wife Cäzilia, as well as their daughter Viktoria and their 7-year-old grandchild Cäzilia, who was Viktoria’s daughter. Inside the house were the bodies of Viktoria’s 2-year-old son Josef and the family’s maid, Maria Baumgartner. Each had been killed with a mattock, a tool similar to a pickaxe. To this day, the case remains unsolved, though it certainly doesn’t lack for creepy details. A few days before March 31, 1922, which investigators narrowed down as the date of the crime, Andreas reported to neighbors that he had found a set of footprints leading through the snow from the nearby woods to his farmstead—but no set of footprints leading back. In addition, neighbors reported seeing smoke coming from the chimney of the Grubers’ home during the weekend before the bodies were found—though at that point, the family and its maid had already been murdered. To this day, no one knows exactly what happened at Hinterkaifeck and who caused it—and at this point, no one probably ever will.

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4.  The Villisca Axe Murders

Another family slaughter, and another crime carried out with the use of an axe. The Villisca Axe Murders took place in the early morning hours of July 10, 1912. An unknown assailant entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore, located in Villisca, Iowa, and killed the entire family, which included 11-year-old Herman, 10-year-old Katherine, 7-year-old Arthur, and 5-year-old Paul. Unfortunate enough to be spending the night were Katherine’s friends, Lena and Ina Mae Stillinger, who, like the Moores, were bludgeoned to death with an axe. The Moores were respected members of the community, and motives for such a gruesome crime were hard to come by. Cigarette butts in the Moores’ attic led police to theorize that the killer had lain in wait for the family, whose members had attended a church function the night before the crime and, upon returning at about 10 p.m., had prepared themselves for a slumber from which they would never awake. A traveling minister named George Kelly, who had been in Villisca on the night of the murders and had an unseemly interest in the case, stood trial twice for the crimes, but was ultimately acquitted. Despite the existence of other suspects, the case was never solved.

In 1833, Frances “Frankie” Silver paid the ultimate price—hanging—for the murder of her husband, Charlie, two years earlier. However, so much legend and myth surround the story of Burke County, North Carolina’s most famous murderess that the actual details of her case may remain as murky as the fog-shrouded mountains of her Appalachian homestead.

Note: Portions of this post originally appeared in my blog, My Michigan, which details unique people, places, and events in the Great Lakes State.

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America’s worst school-related mass murder took place on May 18, 1927 in the sleepy community of Bath, Michigan, located a few miles northeast of the state capital, Lansing.

The Bath School Disaster is a little-known event, having been pushed from national headlines a few days after it occurred by Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight. However, it’s one of the nation’s most significant tragedies; 45 people (mostly children) lost their lives and another 58 were injured at the hands of a deranged local man, Andrew Kehoe, who bombed the school over slights he believed he had suffered at the hands of fellow community members.

Kehoe had purchased a farm in Bath in 1919 and quickly became a thorn in the sides of local leaders. He was an intelligent man, but impatient and frugal. One source of his ire was the Bath Consolidated School , which the community had built so that all the district’s students could attend a single school, rather than divide themselves among the one-room schoolhouses that dotted the area. Kehoe railed against the higher taxes the consolidated school required, but construction proceeded regardless, and the school opened in 1922.

Kehoe eventually served as treasurer of the consolidated school board, where his combative personality and penny-pinching ways made him a difficult person with whom to work. During this time, Kehoe suffered a series of financial and emotional setbacks; his wife was sick with tuberculosis, he couldn’t pay his bills, and, in 1926, his mortgage company announced the start of foreclosure proceedings on his farm. Many students of the disaster believe that Kehoe’s “last straw” was the fact that he lost a race for town clerk in 1926; it was after this supposed slight that he developed his plans to bomb the school.

Kehoe began stockpiling explosives, which he planted in the school’s basement under the guise that he was working on its lighting system. On May 18, 1927, a few days shy of graduation, Kehoe set his plan in motion. Sometime in the days before the bombing, he had killed his wife, Nellie. Around 8:45 a.m. on the 18th, Kehoe set off firebombs he had wired throughout his farm. (Nellie’s body would later be found there, in the charred remains of a chicken coop.) At almost the same time, an alarm clock set by Kehoe detonated the explosives he had planted under the school. The school’s north wing collapsed into a heap of rubble, taking its young occupants and their teachers with it.

Kehoe’s deadly work wasn’t done. As volunteers rushed between his farm and the school, trying to save whoever they could, Kehoe drove his truck, loaded with explosives and metal shrapnel, into town, and parked it near the school. He called to Superintendent Emory Huyck, with whom Kehoe had a fractious relationship. Huyck approached the truck. A witness later testified that he saw Kehoe and Huyck grapple over a gun that Kehoe had brought with him. Suddenly, the truck exploded, killing both Kehoe and Huyck, as well as three other people (including an eight-year-old boy). The blast injured several others.

By the time Kehoe was done wreaking his vengeance, 45 people (including Kehoe and his wife) had died, and 58 had been injured. More would surely have died but for the fact that the explosives Kehoe had wired under the school’s south wing did not detonate, possibly because of a short circuit caused by the first explosion.

While Bath struggled to recover, donations poured in from across the nation, including $75,000 from James J. Couzens, Michigan’s U.S. Senator. In 1928, the new James Couzens Agricultural School opened on the site of the consolidated school building, and served students until its demolition in 1975. The site now contains a memorial park, the centerpiece of which is a cupola that survived the school bombing. The cupola pays tribute to those who lost their lives in one of the deadliest tragedies in Michigan’s—and the nation’s—history.

Caryl Chessman spent 12 years on California’s death row protesting his 1948 conviction on 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape. Throughout his time as a ward of the state, Chessman wrote several books, letters, and essays claiming his innocence. He also filed a number of appeals, insisting that officials had not properly conducted his trial. Chessman’s tale of injustice was so compelling, it earned him eight stays of execution, as well as the support of public figures like author Norman Mailer, poet Robert Frost, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and pastor Billy Graham, all of whom appealed for clemency on his behalf.

Despite Chessman’s very public efforts to avoid execution, his luck ultimately ran out and he entered the gas chamber in San Quentin Prison on May 2, 1960. Yet even the finality of that act seemed in doubt when a call came minutes later, delivering a message from a federal judge who had issued yet another stay of execution. However, prison officials insisted that the call had arrived too late and that they couldn’t open the chamber without endangering the lives of staff members. (Newspapers reported that the secretary who placed the call had misdialed during her first attempt, and that had her initial call gone through, it would have arrived before the execution began.) So it was that, after years of legal wrangling, 39-year-old Chessman met his long-delayed, yet somehow still premature, end.

The fact that Chessman spent most of his adult life behind bars probably didn’t surprise people who knew him as a teenager. Born Carol Whittier Chessman in St. Joseph, Michigan in 1921, Chessman (who later changed the spelling of his first name) moved to California with his family in 1922. As a teenager, he engaged in a series of petty crimes—mostly car thefts—that led to his incarceration in youth lockups. Then, as a member of the “Boy Bandit Gang,” he took part in robberies for which he received jail time in adult prisons. He was released in 1947.

The crimes that led to Chessman’s demise occurred shortly after that, in January 1948. A series of armed robberies in the greater Los Angeles area kept police on high alert, especially once the culprit began pulling over couples in cars, stealing their possessions, and sexually assaulting the female occupants. The so-called “Red Light Bandit” hadn’t murdered anyone, but the public feared what would happen if his crime spree continued.

Witness statements allowed police to issue an all-points bulletin for the mystery assailant. Within hours of the bulletin’s release, officers apprehended Chessman and an accomplice, David Knowles, in a car that had been used during a robbery earlier that month. A few days after his arrest, Chessman confessed to the Red Light Bandit’s crimes (though he later said that police had coerced the confession). At Chessman’s trial, he was found guilty of 17 of the 18 charges against him. Knowles was also found guilty, though because he faced fewer charges than Chessman, he avoided the death penalty. Knowles’ convictions were thrown out in 1950.

That Chessman faced the death penalty for a crime other than murder was an anomaly brought about by the existence of so-called “Little Lindbergh Laws,” which many states passed following the kidnapping and murder of 1-year-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. in 1932. Under California law, kidnapping became a death-penalty offense if committed with the intent to do bodily harm. The fact that Chessman dragged women from their cars to assault them was considered just such an offense, and led to his execution. The Little Lindbergh Laws are no longer in effect.

In addition to his autobiography, “Cell 2455, Death Row,” Chessman’s story is the subject of several books, as well as a 1955 movie with the same title as his autobiography.

Note: This post originally appeared in my blog, My Michigan, which details unique people, places, and events in the Great Lakes State.

It’s a typical love story, told in countless romance novels. A poor boy meets a rich girl and works tirelessly to elevate his social standing so that he can win her affection. The boy woos the girl, marries her, and spirits her away to a life of comfort and luxury in the big city. Then, when the girl’s parents come to visit the newlyweds in their posh new home, the boy kills them.

Okay, so the marriage of Arthur Warren Waite (the boy) and Clara Peck (the girl) was not a storybook romance, a fact with which Clara’s ill-fated parents, John and Hannah Peck, would likely agree. The sad saga of the Peck family began when Waite started dating Clara during high school, shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Waite came from a family of farmers, while Clara enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle made possible by the fortune her father had earned as co-founder of Peck Brothers Drug Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The lovebirds continued their romance after Waite left for The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied dentistry, and later for postgraduate work at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, from which he graduated with honors. The newly minted physician found his way to South Africa, where he served as chief dentist for a mining company. However, Clara was never far from his thoughts and Waite eventually returned to Grand Rapids in 1914 to speed up their courtship.

Trouble was already brewing between Waite and his sweetheart’s family; John Peck disapproved of the relationship, insisting that Waite was too ambitious. However, his concerns fell on deaf ears, and Clara married Waite in Grand Rapids in September 1915. Perhaps as a peace offering, John gave the newlyweds an apartment in Manhattan, where Waite and Clara moved shortly after their marriage and where Waite set up a dental practice.

If Waite had been as diligent about maintaining his practice as he was about playing tennis and hooking up with married women, John and Hannah Peck might have lived the rest of their lives in peace. As it was, not long after arriving in New York City, Waite began an affair with a wealthy married woman, and realized that he needed money to keep his new honey satisfied. Though his in-laws gave him and Clara a monthly stipend, the amount wasn’t enough to please Waite. He hatched a plan to get his hands on the rest of the Pecks’ fortune, and put it into action in January 1916, when Hannah Peck arrived in New York to visit her daughter and son-in-law.

Hannah likely relished the chance to relax and catch up with her family while spending time in a fast-paced, cosmopolitan city. However, ten days after her arrival, she was dead, and her cremated remains sent back to Grand Rapids. Waite insisted on overseeing the cremation and funeral preparations so that the rest of the grieving family would be spared the task.

John Peck mourned his deceased wife, but was also grateful for the way Waite had taken charge of the situation. The eldest Peck decided a visit to his daughter and son-in-law was in order, and he arrived in New York City in March 1916. In an eerie coincidence, he, like his wife, died not long after. As he had done after Hannah’s death, Waite insisted that a quick cremation and return to Grand Rapids was in order. However, Clara and her brother, Percy, resisted, saying that their father was so well-known in his hometown that mourners would certainly want to see his body.

Not wanting to invite suspicion, Waite gave in, but his murderous plot was already unraveling. When Percy returned to Grand Rapids, he received a telegram from an unknown person, “K. Adams,” that urged him to have his father’s body examined. (It was later revealed that a Peck relative, Elizabeth Hardwicke, had sent the telegram after seeing Waite parade around New York City with his mistress.) Percy arranged for the exam, during which physicians discovered traces of arsenic and chloroform in his father’s body. Their conclusion was that John Peck and, in all probability, his wife Hannah, had been murdered.

At first, Clara insisted that her husband had nothing to do with her parents’ suspicious deaths, but the evidence quickly mounted against Waite. The man who embalmed John Peck told police that Waite offered him money to put arsenic in the embalming fluid, so that examiners would attribute the presence of that substance in John’s body to the embalmer’s work, and not to Waite’s deadly deeds. (Though the embalmer accepted the money, he never spiked the fluid with arsenic.) Police also found an atomizer that Waite had filled with typhoid and anthrax germs, and had then given to Clara when she caught a cold. (Clara refused to inhale from it, a decision that likely saved her from becoming the third Peck to die at the hands of Arthur Waite.)

The evidence against Waite was piling up, and Waite, seeing no way out, tried to kill himself with sleeping pills before finally confessing to the murders of John and Hannah Peck. Waite said he had dosed the couple with anthrax and typhoid strains that he had stolen from a hospital. While Hannah died right away, John hadn’t perished quickly enough for Waite, who eventually resorted to arsenic. When that still didn’t work, Waite smothered John to death with chloroform.

The reason for Waite’s crimes? Money, plain and simple. Waite had set his sights on the Peck fortune when he was just a kid, and everything he did afterward–courting Clara, graduating from The University of Michigan (through which he had cheated his way to a degree), and attending the University of Glasgow (where he forged papers stating that he had graduated from the institution)–moved Waite closer to that goal. The dentist admitted that he planned to kill everyone in the Peck family, so despite the fact that Clara and Percy Peck lost their parents to a deranged sociopath, they were also lucky in a sense, as they had escaped his murderous clutches.

Waite was tried and convicted for his crimes, and executed in the electric chair on May 1, 1917. John and Hannah Peck are buried in Oakhill Cemetery in Grand Rapids.